“Marshall, that toe is the key to the situation.”
In Ireland we went about a good deal together in jaunting cars and extracted a lot of high-grade Hibernian wit from the drivers. Although Mr. Beecher was one of the sensible souls who could discern the difference between poverty and misery, he had an American’s innate soft spot in his heart for a man in rags, so he overpaid our drivers so enormously that Mrs. Beecher, who was with us, begged that she might be allowed to do the disbursing.
One day we were driven to our hotel in Belfast through a drizzling rain. When I paid the driver I said:
“Are you wet, Pat?” With a merry twinkle of his eye he replied:
“Sure, your honor, if I was as wet outside as I am inside, I’d be as dry as a bone.”
Mr. Beecher’s quickness at repartee, of which Americans knew well, was entirely equal to Irish demands upon it. One day in Ireland, after he had made an address to a Sunday-school, a bewitching young colleen came up to where we stood chatting and said:
“Mr. Beecher, you have won my heart.”
“Well,” replied the great man quickly, with a sunburst of a smile, “you can’t get along without a heart, so suppose you take mine?”
Which reminds me of the day when he and Col. “Bob” Ingersoll were on the platform together at a public meeting and Beecher went over and shook hands heartily with the great agnostic, though he knew that the act would bring a storm of criticism from people with narrow-gauge souls. Then Ingersoll brought up one of his daughters and introduced her, saying:
“Mr. Beecher, here is a girl who never read the Bible.” Bob delighted in shocking ministers, but he missed his fun that time, for Beecher quickly replied: