“Ladies and Gentlemen: I have traveled a great deal in my life and on one of my journeys I took in the mountains of East Tennessee. I paused in that peculiar country to study the customs of that peculiar people. They make maple sugar in East Tennessee. They have great sugar orchards there, and one of the customs of the people is to tap the sugar trees in the spring when the sap begins to rise and they give the children in the family a tin cup and turn them out into the sugar orchard and never see them any more for six weeks. I have the pleasure to introduce to you to-night a sap-sucker from East Tennessee!” There was a lull and a laugh, And the sap began to run, And they kindly took a quaff From my sugar-trough of fun. I settled with the secretary of the treasury and mounted a March hare train and sped away through many a cotton patch, from town to town, out of Georgia into the Old North State, and, flanking Charlotte, squatted at the State University at Chapel Hill, that classic spot of earth so rich with memories of the glorious past and still teeming with joyous student life, like those who have gone before, dreaming of the glorious future. There I met Dr. Battle, that grand old man who has fought a thousand battles for enlightenment and human happiness. There I met Alphonso Smith, one of the South’s foremost young men in the field of educational endeavor and whose soul is in tune with Southern progress and Southern development. There, too, I met Eben Alexander, a brilliant star from the sky of Tennessee, shedding the soft light of Grecian literature upon the youthful brain of Carolina. I met a score of other stars in the faculty of this great University. I stood on the platform of its splendid auditorium and tossed bouquets at as refined and cultured an audience as ever sipped sap from a sugar tree. And when I packed my grip and started Southward I could not repress the sweet old song: “Hurrah! hurrah! for the Old North State forever! Hurrah! hurrah! for the good Old North State!” Finally, I landed in Charleston, South Carolina, where I played Beauregard, but instead of firing bomb shells at Ft. Sumter, I fired soap bubbles at the heads and hearts of a magnificent audience of representative Charlestonians; and whether I pleased them or not, they were so generous and hospitable as to flatter me with occasional bombs of laughter and a few volleys of applause. I swung back through Alabama to my home in Nashville, on hearing the news that the political sap was rising; but, alas! only to find that the Tennessee sugar tree was already tapped, you see, and that the senatorial sugar-trough was full of sap-suckers holding a snap caucus, and there was a lull and a laugh—I lulled and they laughed. When I awoke from my lull I kissed my wife and children good-bye, and broke for Texas, the queenly young sister of Tennessee, who took me in her arms, and brushing away my political tears, pressed me to her loving heart.