Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/510



On the 11th of December, 1909, I dined in New York with the Pennsylvania Society of that city at the Waldorf-Astoria. It was a great dinner given to Philander C. Knox, Franklin MacVeagh and Wickersham, the three Pennsylvanians in the cabinet of President Taft. The two United States Senators—Penrose and Oliver; Governor Stuart; Horace Howard Furness, the Shakespearean scholar; the former Governor, James A. Beaver; Von Moschzisker, the coming Supreme Court Justice; Lloyd C. Griscom; John Wanamaker; and many others were among the guests. Andrew Carnegie presided and did it well. It was my fortune to sit alongside of Robert E. Peary for the greater part of the evening. A few evenings before, in the Academy of Music, I had heard his first lecture since the discovery of the North Pole and once before I had dined with him, when he was not so famous. He received much of the attention shown to the celebrities throughout the evening and made the first speech. It was a meritorious speech, brief and with a thought in it. He said in substance that he had been born along the Susquehanna, reared in Maine, and supported by the contributions of New York, and, therefore, was under special obligation to the people of three states; that for hundreds of years explorers had striven to find the North Pole and to find a passageway between the two great oceans, and in our day both tasks had been accomplished. That was all he said. A tall, slim man, with steel-blue eyes, a mustache, a sandy complexion, while the red in his hair was not at all a color but a tendency, alone pointing to some more or less remote ancestor, and a self-contained manner indicating strength of will and poise. He was not obtrusive or effusive, neither was he deprecatory, and when he spoke there was not the slightest symptom of nervousness.

“Commander, when I heard you the other night, it was all clear to me except your getting across those stretches 490