ry often did the wrong thing.
And I have no doubt that wherever he went he helped hold good the
precedent that preachers' boys are not especially angelic. For instance,
we have it on good authority that Bob, aged fourteen, once climbed into
the belfry of a church and removed the clapper, so that the sexton
thought the bell was bewitched. At another time he placed a washtub over
the top of a chimney where a prayer-meeting was in progress, and the
smoke broke up the meeting and gave the good people a foretaste of the
place they believed in. In these stories, told to prove his depravity,
Bob was always climbing somewhere--belfries, steeples, house-tops,
trees, verandas, barn-roofs, bridges. But I have noticed that youngsters
given to the climbing habit usually do something when they grow up.

For these climbing pranks Robert and Ebon were duly reproved with a
stout strap that hung behind the kitchen-door. Whether the parsonage was
in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio or Illinois--and it dodged all over
these States--the strap always traveled, too. It never got lost. It need
not be said that the Reverend John Ingersoll was cruel or abusive--not
at all: he just believed with Solomon that to spare the rod was to spoil
the child. He loved his children, and if a boy could be saved by so
simple a means as "strap-oil," he was not the man to shirk his duty. He
was neither better nor worse than the average preacher of his day. No
doubt, too, the poverty and constant misunderstandings with
congregations led to much irritability--it is hard to be amiable on
half-rations.

When a stepmother finally appeared upon the scene, there was more
trouble for the children. She was a worthy woman and meant to be kind,
but her heart wasn't big enough to love boys who carried live mice in
their pockets and turned turtles loose in the pantry.

So we find Bob and his brother bundled off to his Grandfather
Livingston's in Saint Lawrence County, New York. Here Bob got his first
real educational advantages. The old man seems to have been a sort of
"Foxy Grandpa": he played, romped, read and studied with the boys and
possibly neutralized some of the discipline they had received.

Of his childhood days Robert Ingersoll very rarely spoke. There was too
much bitterness and disappointment in it all, but it is curious to note
that when he did speak of his boyhood, it was always something that
happened at "Grandfather Livingston's," Finally, the old Grandpa got