If We Were To
Consider The Number Of Books, Dress-Coats, Gloves And Other Articles
Of More Intimate Character That Were Exchanged Between Us, It Might
More Safely Have Been Called The Society For Mutual Support.
At all
events, from the spectacle before me this evening I gather that this
Society of Mutual Admiration, if
Admiration it must be termed, has
taken a singular development since I had the honour of assisting so
frequently at its meetings, and there is nothing surprising in this,
since one of the most distinguished of the founders of this society,
Mr. Faucher de St. Maurice, informed me the other day that the society
in question was about to annex the French Academy. (Laughter.) But to
be serious, allow me to recount another anecdote. There was a time,
gentlemen, when our Mutual Admiration was far from being so ambitious
as to dream of having a succursale under the rotunda of the
French Institute. But if our productions were meagre, our revenues
were still more so, and famine often reigned in the chests of the
confraternity. However we had our own days of abundance when there was
corn in Egypt. The first Quebecer who understood that poetry, unlike
perpetual motion, could not feed itself, was a brewer, whose memory is
now legendary and who was known by the harmonious name of McCallum.
Arthur Casgrain, who in a couple of years afterwards we sorrowfully
bore to the cemetery, had thought of composing an Epic on the Grand
Trunk.
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