"Bob and his family stopped a whole day with me," he said, "and we got to be great friends. His girls came right out here into this kitchen where you are sitting now and helped me wash the dishes. They was calling me 'Uncle Jim' before they had been here an hour. Well, the people down there persuaded Bob to give a lecture in Livingston, and I drove down the whole forty miles to hear it. When the lecture was over Bob came up to me in the Albermarle and asked me what I thought of it. 'Mr. Ingersoll,' said I, 'I don't like to tell you.' 'I like a man that speaks his mind,' says he; 'go on.' 'Well, Mr. Ingersoll,' said I, 'I think you're making a grievous mistake in standing there and hurting the feelings, and shaking the faith, of almost the whole audience, just for the sake of the one or two as thinks as you do.' At first I thought he was going to come back at me, but all of a sudden he laughed right out in his jolly way, and took my arm and said, 'Mr. George, let's have a drink.' Bob, in spite of his pernishus doctrines, was the most lovable man I ever met." Now this was a very different account of the clash from the one I had heard in Livingston. There I was assured that the debate took place at the Albemarle bar about midnight, and that Jim had Bob's hide on the fence at the end of five minutes of verbal pyrotechnics. But it was characteristic of Jim that he would neither boast nor talk of Injuns during his non-drinking periods. Doubtless, therefore, he was far from doing himself justice in relating the Ingersoll episode. I surely would like to have heard it when the sign of the black bottle was in the ascendant. Jim admitted a clear remembrance of Kipling's visit, but was chary of speaking of it, doubtless on account of the squaw-at-the-stake story. (His atrocity yarns troubled him more than any other when they came home to roost, so they assured me in Livingston.) Of Roscoe Conkling his impressions were not friendly, even in the benevolence of his present mood. "Conkling caught the biggest fish a tourist ever caught in the Canyon," he said, "He was a great hand with a rod, but, in my candid opinion, greatly over-rated as a public man. He had the nerve to cheat me out of the price of a case of beer. Ordered it for a couple of coachloads of his friends and then drove off without paying for it. Yes, possibly a mistake; but these politicians are slippery cusses at the best."