The dinner bell, the dinner bell Is ringing loud and clear, Through hill and plain, through street and lane It echoes far and near. I hear the voice! I go, I go! Prepare your meat and wine; They little heed their future need Who pay not when they dine. --_O.W.H._ The back of the despatch was decorated with two pictures; one showing Doctor Fordyce Barker ringing a dinner bell and brandishing a knife and fork, the other Doctor Holmes hurrying to answer the bell, with a pile of books under one arm and a bundle of bones under the other. Among the guests present were George William Curtis, Hon. William M. Evarts, Bishop Clark, Whitelaw Reid, Doctors Post, Emmett, Sayre, Billing, Vanderpoel Metcalfe, Detmoold Draper, Doremus, Hammond, St. J. Roosa, Flint, Dana, Peabody, Ranney, Jacobi, Austin, and many others. The first toast was as follows: The hour's now come; The very minute bids thee ope thine ear Obey, and be attentive. --_The Tempest._ After a few brief words of introduction, Doctor Barker called upon Doctor A.H. Smith to complete the greeting, which he did in the following happy lines: You've heard of the deacon's one hoss shay Which, finished in Boston the self-same day That the City of Lisbon went to pot, Did a century's service, and then was not. But the record's at fault which says that it burst Into simply a heap of amorphous dust, For after the wreck of that wonderful tub Out of the ruins they saved a hub; And the hub has since stood for Boston town, Hub of the universe, note that down. But an orderly hub as all will own, Must have something central to turn upon, And, rubber-cushioned, and true and bright We have the axle here to-night. Thrice welcome then to our festal board The doctor-poet, so doubly stored With science as well as with native wit, _Poeta nascitur_, you know, _non fit_, Skilled to dissect with knife or pen His subjects dead or living men; With thought sublime on every page To swell the veins with virtuous rage, Or with a syringe to inject them With sublimate to disinfect them; To show with demonstrator's art The complex chambers of the heart, Or armed with a diviner skill To make it pulsate at his will; With generous verse to celebrate The loaves and fishes of some giver; And then proceed to demonstrate The lobes and fissures of the liver; To soothe the pulses of the brain With poetry's enchanting strain. Or to describe to class uproarious _Pes hippocampi accessorious_; To nerve with fervor of appeal The sluggish muscles into steel, Or, pulling their attachments, show Whence they arise and where they go; To fire the eye by wit consummate, Or draw the aqueous humor from it;