.

I believe I said that the Reverend John Ingersoll was a powerful
preacher: he was so powerful he quickly made enemies. He told men of
their weaknesses in phrase so pointed that necks would be craned to see
how certain delinquents took their medicine. Then some would get up and
tramp out during the sermon in high dudgeon. These disaffected ones
would influence others: contributions grew less, donations ceased, and
just as a matter of bread and butter a new "call" would be angled for,
and the parson's family would pack up--helped by the faction that loved
them, and the one that didn't. Good-bys were said, blessings given--or
the reverse--and the jokers would say, "A change of pastors makes fat
calves."

At one time the Reverend John Ingersoll tried to start an independent
church in New York City. For a year he preached every Sunday at the old
Lyceum Theater, and here it was, on the stage of the theater, in
Eighteen Hundred Thirty-four, that Robert G. Ingersoll was baptized.

But the New York venture failed--starved out was the verdict, and a
country parish extending a call, it was gladly accepted.

Such a life, to such a woman, was particularly wearing. But Mrs.
Ingersoll kept right at her work, always doing for others, until there
came a day when kind neighbors came in and cared for her, looked after
her household, attending this stricken mother--tired out and old at
thirty-one, unaware that she had blessed the world by giving to it a
man-child who was to make an epoch.

The watchers one night straightened the stiffening limbs, clothed the
body in the gown that had been her wedding-dress, and folded the
calloused fingers over the spray of flowers.

"Hush, little boy--your Mamma is dead!" said the tall man, as he lifted
the child and carried him from the room.

* * * * *

From the sleepy little village of Dresden, Yates County, New York, seven
miles from Penn Yan, where Robert Ingersoll was born, to his niche in
the Temple of Fame, was a zigzag journey. But that is Nature's plan--we
make head by tacking. And as the years go by, more and more we see the
line of Ingersoll's life stretching itself straight. Every change to him
meant progress. Success is a question of temperament--it is all a matter
of the red corpuscle. Ingersoll was a success; happy, exuberant, joying
in life, reveling in existence, he marched to the front in every fray.

As a boy he was so full of life that he ve