Col. Ingersoll's views regarding the Bible and Christianity were not generally understood by the public for some time after he had become famous as an orator, although he began to diverge from orthodoxy when quite young, and was as pronounced an Agnostic when he went into the army, as he is now. Col. Ingersoll is an inch less than six feet tall, and weighs ten more than two hundred pounds. He will be sixty- one next August, and his hair is snowy. His shoulders are broad and as straight as they were eighteen years ago when he electrified a people and place! his own name upon the list of a nation's greatest orators with his matchless "Plumed Knight" speech in nominating James G. Blaine for the presidency. His blue eyes look straight into yours when he speaks to you, and his sentences are punctuated by engaging little tricks of facial expression--now the brow is criss-crossed with the lines of a frown, sometimes quizzical and sometimes indignant--next, the smooth-shaven lips break into a curving smile, which may grow into a broad grin if the point just made were a humorous one, and this is quite likely to be followed by a look of sueh intense earnestness that you wonder if he will ever smile again. And all the time his eyes flash, illuminating, sometimes anticipatory, glances that add immensely to the clearness with which the thought he is expressing is set before you. He delights to tell a story, and he never tells any but good ones, but--and in this he is like Lincoln--he is apt to use his stories to drive some proposition home. This is almost invariably true, even when he sets out to spin a yarn for the story's simple sake. His mentality seems to be duplex, quadruplex, multiplex, if you please--and while his lips and tongue are effectively delivering the story, his wonderful brain is, seemingly, unconsciously applying the point of the story to the proving of a pet theory, and when the tale has been told the verbal application follows. His birthplace was Dresden, N. Y. His early boyhood was passed in New York State and his youth and young manhood in Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin. His handgrasp is hearty and his manner and words are the very essence of straightforward directness. I called at his office once when the Colonel was closeted with a person who wished to retain him in a law case involving a good deal of money. After a bit I was told that I could see him, and as I entered he was saying: "The case can't be won, for you are in the wrong. I don't want it." "But," pleaded the would-be client, "It seems to me that a good deal can be done in such a case by the way it is handled before the jury, and I thought if you were to be the man I might get a verdict."