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The one time in the life of Savonarola when he comes nearest to us is when his tortured flesh wrenched from his spirit a recantation. And who can forget that cry of Calvary, “My God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me!” That call for help, coming to us across twenty centuries, makes the man, indeed, our Elder Brother.

And let it here be stated that even Bob’s bitterest foe never declared that the man was a coward by nature, nor that the business of his life was hiding in pig-pens. The incident named was exceptional and therefore noteworthy; let us admit it, at least not worry ourselves into a passion denying it. Let us also stipulate the truth that Bob could never quite overcome the temptation to take an unfair advantage of his opponent in an argument. He laid the fools by the heels and suddenly, ‘gainst all the rules of either Roberts or Queensbury.

To go after the prevaricators, and track them to their holes, is to make much of little, and lift the liars into the realm of equals. This story of the pig-pen I never heard of until Ingersoll’s friends denied it in a book.

Just one instance to show how trifles light as air are to the zealous confirmation strong as holy writ. In April, Eighteen Hundred Ninety-four, Ingersoll lectured at Utica, New York. The following Sunday a local clergyman denounced the lecturer as a sensualist, a gourmand–one totally indifferent to decency and the feelings and rights of others. Then the 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 world calls a man by a nickname, it is a patent to nobility–small men are never so honored.