But the New York venture failed--starved out was the verdict, and a country parish extending a call, it was gladly accepted. Such a life, to such a woman, was particularly wearing. But Mrs. Ingersoll kept right at her work, always doing for others, until there came a day when kind neighbors came in and cared for her, looked after her household, attending this stricken mother--tired out and old at thirty-one, unaware that she had blessed the world by giving to it a man-child who was to make an epoch. The watchers one night straightened the stiffening limbs, clothed the body in the gown that had been her wedding-dress, and folded the calloused fingers over the spray of flowers. "Hush, little boy--your Mamma is dead!" said the tall man, as he lifted the child and carried him from the room. * * * * * From the sleepy little village of Dresden, Yates County, New York, seven miles from Penn Yan, where Robert Ingersoll was born, to his niche in the Temple of Fame, was a zigzag journey. But that is Nature's plan--we make head by tacking. And as the years go by, more and more we see the line of Ingersoll's life stretching itself straight. Every change to him meant progress. Success is a question of temperament--it is all a matter of the red corpuscle. Ingersoll was a success; happy, exuberant, joying in life, reveling in existence, he marched to the front in every fray. As a boy he was so full of life that he very often did the wrong thing. And I have no doubt that wherever he went he helped hold good the precedent that preachers' boys are not especially angelic. For instance, we have it on good authority that Bob, aged fourteen, once climbed into the belfry of a church and removed the clapper, so that the sexton thought the bell was bewitched. At another time he placed a washtub over the top of a chimney where a prayer-meeting was in progress, and the smoke broke up the meeting and gave the good people a foretaste of the place they believed in. In these stories, told to prove his depravity, Bob was always climbing somewhere--belfries, steeples, house-tops, trees, verandas, barn-roofs, bridges. But I have noticed that youngsters given to the climbing habit usually do something when they grow up.