preacher said, "At breakfast in this city last
Thursday, Ingersoll ordered everything on the bill of fare, and then
insulted and roundly abused the waiter-girl because she did not bring
things that were not in the hotel."

I happened to be present at that meal. It was an "early-train
breakfast," and the bill of fare for the day had not been printed. The
girl came in, and standing at the Colonel's elbow, in genuine
waiter-girl style, mumbled this: "Ham and eggs, mutton-chops,
beefsteak, breakfast bacon, codfish balls and buckwheat cakes."

And Bob solemnly said: "Ham and eggs, mutton-chops, beefsteak, breakfast
bacon, codfish balls and buckwheat cakes."

In amazement the girl gasped, "What?" And then Bob went over it
backward: "Buckwheat cakes, codfish balls, breakfast bacon, beefsteak,
mutton-chops, and ham and eggs."

This memory test raised a laugh that sent a shout of mirth all through
the room, in which even the girl joined.

"Haven't you anything else, my dear?" asked the great man in a sort of
disappointed way.

"I think we have tripe and pig's feet," said the girl.

"Bring a bushel," said Bob; "and say, tell the cook I'd like a dish of
peacock-tongues on the side." The infinite good nature of it all caused
another laugh from everybody.

The girl brought everything Bob ordered except the peacock-tongues, and
this order supplied the lecturer and his party of four. The waitress
found a dollar-bill under Bob's plate, and the cook who stood in the
kitchen-door and waved a big spoon, and called, "Good-by, Bob!" got
another dollar for himself.

Ingersoll carried mirth, and joy, and good-cheer, and radiated a feeling
of plenitude wherever he went. He was a royal liver and a royal spender.
"If I had but a dollar," he used to say, "I'd spend it as though it
were a dry leaf, and I were the owner of an unbounded forest." He
maintained a pension-list of thirty persons or more for a decade, spent
upwards of forty thousand dollars a year, and while the fortune he left
for his wife and children was not large, as men count things on 'Change,
yet it is ample for their ease and comfort. His family always called him
"Robert" with an almost idolatrous flavor of tender love in the word.
But to the world who hated him and the world who loved him, he was just
plain "Bob." To trainmen, hackdrivers, and the great singers, poets and
players, he was "Bob." "Dignity is the mask behind which we hide our
ignorance." When half a wor