Hume House Among the Week's Hospitalities
From the Sunday society page of the Port Hume Beacon, 27 November 1921, p. 6 col. 3. Signed M. R. L. (Mrs. Margaret R. Loomis, society correspondent to the Beacon since 1916; no kin of H. Loomis the clerk at Hume Shipping, though she has remarked upon the coincidence of name at more than one Methodist supper). The clipping, neatly trimmed and pressed between the leaves of Mrs. Mary Costigan's prayer-book, was found at her removal to the Sisters of Mercy in 1934.
Friday last brought the close of another of those standing evenings at Hume House on Holland Street by which the city has come, in this quarter-century, to mark the rhythm of its better Decembers in advance. Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Hume received in the front drawing-room from seven until nine; the gathering was not large, the company being chiefly the officers of Hume Shipping and three of the older members of the Erie Trust Company's directorate, with their ladies.
It is by Mr. Hume's settled custom on these Friday evenings to bestow, upon those of his establishment and his employ who have given the household and the firm the credit of long service, the monthly token of remembrance for which his generosity has so long been remarked in this city. Mrs. Mary Costigan, the housekeeper, with whom the management of these particulars has rested by Mr. Hume's confidence for some eighteen years, attended to the disposition of the evening as she has attended to those preceding it — with that quiet exactness for which the Beacon has more than once had occasion to thank her at our own door.
A small supper was laid by Mrs. Costigan's hand in the back parlor after nine, the gentlemen retiring there with Mr. Hume; the ladies took coffee with Mrs. Hume in the front. The evening broke up before eleven, as is the household's rule.
— M. R. L.
[On the reverse of the clipping, in pencil, in Mrs. Costigan's hand:]
kept.