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 world calls a man by a nickname, it is a patent to nobility—small men are never so honored.
"Good-by, Bob," called the white-aproned cook as he stood in the kitchen-door and waved his big spoon.
"Good-by, Brother, and mind you get those peacock-tongues by the time I get back," answered Bob.
As to Ingersoll's mental evolution we can not do better than to let him tell the story himself:
Like the most of us, I was raised among people who knew—who were certain. They did not reason or investigate. They had no doubts. They knew they had the truth. In their creed there was no guess—no perhaps. They had a revelation from God. They knew the beginning of things. They knew that God commenced to create one Monday morning and worked until Saturday night, four thousand and four years before Christ. They knew that in the eternity—back of that morning, He had done nothing. They knew that it took Him six days to make the earth—all plants, all animals, all life, and all the globes that wheel in space. They knew exactly what He did each day and when He rested. They knew the origin, the cause, of evil, of all crime, of all disease and death.