AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN
speeches. The Clover Club and the Five o'Clock Club were the principal dining clubs and their style of entertainment was pretty much alike, giving their guests plenty of good champagne and expecting them to endure with complacence all of the ribaldry which the combined wit of perhaps a hundred hosts could devise. The Society of the Cincinnati always gave an attractive dinner. They had a considerable fund of money, and after their Washington Monument in Fairmount Park and other expenditures were provided for, had nothing to do with it except once or twice a year to have a beautiful dinner. It was only excelled by that of the Directors of the Pennsylvania Company for Insurance on Lives and Granting Annuities, an ancient and very wealthy corporation. They gathered about a circular table upon which everything was of the best which money could secure, and the space in the center was banked with rare flowers. No outsiders were invited, save the judges and their counsel, John G. Johnson, who never drank anything except from a pitcher of lemonade prepared for him alone. The dining-room at the Bellevue was too limited in space to entertain a crowd and, therefore, the dinners were never unwieldy and never delayed. At the dinner of the Clover Club George G. Pierie always sang a crude song called “The Darby Ram,” and at the dinner of the Five o'clock Club to each guest was presented a time-piece of some kind as a souvenir.
In 1892 the Pennsylvania Society of the Colonial Dames of America, a society of women whose forefathers had borne some part in colonial public affairs prior to the Revolutionary War, was organized. Mrs. Pennypacker became a member and one of its controlling committee of thirteen. About the same time I was selected by the Pennsylvania Society Sons of the Revolution, of which I was then one of the board of managers and of which I have since become the senior vice-president, a delegate to the National Convention which met at Mount Vernon. A little later in the same year the
