A dinner party, however, even a Boston dinner party, has in addition to its social and intellectual side a practical, alimentary aspect not to be ignored by anyone, particularly an artist. And since the act of obtaining nourishment employs the function of swallowing, and the function of swallowing cannot be successfully synchronized with that of speech, there were of necessity occasional brief pauses in the flow of oratory. It was at the moment of one of these unavoidable pauses that a lady (to be remembered, as was the “clergyman” who interrupted Dr. Johnson, only by her temerity) seized the opportunity to get a word in edgewise. Now the traffic laws that regulate the respective movements of the human pharynx and larynx are as inexorable as those that govern our public highways, and at the same instant that the lady opened her mouth to speak, the Edwardian larynx resumed its right of way. “Oh, pardon me, Mr. Simmons, I interrupted you,” was all she could manage to gasp. “Madam,” replied Simmons, with the Chesterfieldian smile the gift of which many an Academician would give all his decorations to possess—“madam, no one can _speak_ without interrupting me!” And that is why I have chosen to call my impertinent preface to a narrative which for human interest can (to my thinking) be compared only to that of Benvenuto Cellini, an— But pardon me, Mr. Simmons, I am interrupting you! OLIVER HERFORD. Introduction _A Yankee Heritage_ For years I have wanted to make two cartoons—the first, dated 1800, to be simply a lovely woman holding a baby, and called, “New England with Her Child America.” In the second, dated 1900, the mother, New England, is grown old and, clad in a poke bonnet and mitts, is sitting in a carriage with her son, America, who is now a bearded man smoking a black cigar. He is driving, the horse is running away, and she is trying to grab the reins. He yells: “Ma, if you don’t stop that there will be trouble!” I was born in the middle of the last century, when this bearded man was still a youth, and I have watched his struggles throughout the years, until, without his mother’s realizing it, he has slipped quietly from home to go out and mingle with the rest of the world, leaving her, a toothless and old grandma, to sit by the fire and dream that she is still the young mother of the cartoon.