"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I should be more or less than human, if I could meet this unexpected and overwhelming testimonial at your hands, without the deepest emotion. My own personal connection with the Museum is now resumed, and I avail myself of the circumstance to say why it is so. Never did I feel stronger in my worldly prosperity than in September, 1855. Three months later I was so deeply embarrassed that I felt certain of nothing, except the uncertainty of everything. A combination of singular efforts and circumstances tempted me to put faith in a certain clock manufacturing company, and I placed my signature to papers which ultimately broke me down. After nearly five years of hard struggle to keep my head above water, I have touched bottom at last, and here to-night I am happy to announce that I have waded ashore. Every clock debt of which I have any knowledge has been provided for. Perhaps, after the troubles and turmoils I have experienced, I should feel no desire to re-engage in the excitements of business; but a man like myself, less than fifty years of age, and enjoying robust health, is scarcely old enough to be embalmed and put in a glass case in the Museum as one of its million of curiosities. 'It is better to wear out than rust out.' Besides, if a man of active temperament is not busy, he is apt to get into mischief. To avoid evil, therefore, and since business activity is a necessity of my nature, here I am, once more, in the Museum, and among those with whom I have been so long and so pleasantly identified. I am confident of a cordial welcome, and hence feel some claim to your indulgence while I briefly allude to the means of my present deliverance from utter financial ruin. Need I say, in the first place, that I am somewhat indebted to the forbearance of generous creditors. In the next place, permit me to speak of sympathizing friends, whose volunteered loans and exertions vastly aided my rescue. When my day of sorrow came, I first paid or secured every debt I owed of a personal nature. This done, I felt bound in honor to give up all of my property that remained toward liquidating my 'clock debts.' I placed it in the hands of trustees and receivers for the benefit of all the 'clock' creditors. But at the forced sale of my Connecticut real estate, there was a purchaser behind the screen, of whom the world had little knowledge. In the day of my prosperity I made over to my wife much valuable property, including the lease of this Museum building--a lease then having about twenty-two years to run, and enhanced in value to more than double its original worth. I sold the Museum collection to Messrs. Greenwood & Butler, subject to my wife's separate interest in the lease, and she has received more than $80,000 over and above the sums paid to the owners of the building. Instead of selfishly applying this amount to private purposes, my family lived with a due regard to economy, and the savings