"It is for this that we honor the pioneers. It is for this that we are proud and happy to have them meet among us. We are their heirs. Our inheritance is the fruit of their labor, the reward of their fortitude, the recompense of their hardships. The home of today, the center of comfort and contentment, the very soul of the state, could not have been but for the log cabins of forty years ago. The imposing edifice of learning, the complete system of education, could not have been but for the crude school house of the past. The churches and religious institutions of today are the result of the untiring and unselfish labors of the itinerant preacher who wandered back and forth, now painfully picking his way through the forest, now threading with his frail canoe the silver streams, now gliding over the calm waters of the Sound, ever laying broad and deep the true foundations of the grand civilization that was to be. The flourishing cities, the steel rails that bind us to the world, the stately steamers that, behemoth-like, journey to and fro in our waters,--these things could not be but for the rude straggling hamlets, the bridle path cut with infinite labor through the most impenetrable of forests, and the canoe which darted arrow-like through gloomy passages, over bright bays and up laughing waters. "All honor to the pioneers--all honor and welcome. We say it who are their heirs, we whose homes are on the land which they reclaimed from the forests, we who till the fields that they first tilled, we whose pride and glory is the grand land-locked sea on which they gazed delighted so many years ago. Welcome to them, and may they come together again and again as the years pass away. When their eyes are dim with age and their hair is as white as the snows that cover the mountains they love, may they still see the land which they created the home of a great, proud people, a people loving the land they love, a people honoring and obeying the laws that they have honored and obeyed so long, a people honoring, glorying in, the flag which they bore over treeless plains, over lofty mountains, over raging torrents, through suffering and danger, always proudly, always confidently, always hopefully, until they planted it by the shore of the Western sea in the most beautiful of all lands. May each old settler, as he journeys year by year toward the shoreless sea, over whose waters he must journey away, feel that the flag which he carried so far and so bravely will wave forever in the soft southwestern breeze, which kisses his furrowed brow and toys with his silvery hair. May he feel, too, that the love of the people is with him, that they watch him, lovingly, tenderly, as he journeys down the pathway, and the story of his deeds is graven