He dislikes the "madding crowd," is never in the enjoyment of greater happiness than when alone, or with some chosen friend, lying on the grass of the great prairies of his State, near the wooded margin of some stream, watching the squadrons of cranes dancing their wierd cotillions on the sand dunes, or the red-wattled buzzards circling high in air above him. His love for the unartificial is marvelous; to him when reading the Bucolics of Virgil, if from the window of his study or a secluded spot under the grateful shade of some gnarled old tree, he can see the waving grain, flocks of sheep, and cattle quietly grazing in the stillness of their surroundings, the words of the immortal poet have a deeper significance, a grander charm.

To those who may claim his friendship, he is a most congenial and affable companion. He is a good listener, a characteristic which under some circumstances detracts from many who are regarded as brilliant conversationalists; that class of talkers who never give their friends a chance. Mr. Ingalls, however, delights in the style of verbal intercourse where every one present is expected and permitted to take part.

Mr. Ingalls' physical characteristics are as difficult. to intelligently describe as are those of his phenomenal intellect. I am indebted to a mutual friend, Mr. Charles S. Gleed, of Topeka, for the best pen-picture I have ever seen, which is here introduced at length. It is strangely truthful, and possesses in the construction of its language a thoroughly Western style of authorship, born of the boundless prairies:

"Mr. Ingall's personal appearance is remarkable. His height is over six feet, and his weight perhaps one hundred and forty pounds. He is as gracefully straight as a sunflower stalk, and as conspicuous among men as a sunflower among dandelions. dandelions. His hair is silvery, stiff, disheveled. He looks old, yet is strong and lusty, hav

ing never in youth 'applied hot and rebellious liquors to his blood.' His head is high behind and deep from forehead to back, giving the impression of great length from the chin upward and backward. Below his forelock of wire-silver is a face dark and angular, suggesting Spanish blood, and his audacious mustache and the impudent tuft on his under lip do not belie the suggestion. His eyes may be 'red, white and blue,' like his necktie, for all anybody knows. They are hidden behind the most brilliant eye-glasses that ever disconcerted an interlocutor. His hands are bony, and when his long-jointed fingers twine about his pen, the only result to be expected is the extraordinarily beautiful manuscript which he always turns out. He could not well spare a single ounce of flesh, and his body has the lithe, firm looseness of a professional contortionist. Lean as he is, his clothing always seems to fit perfectly and is always graceful.

(

"His voice is a polished ramrod of sound, without fur or feathers, traversing space as swiftly as light, without a whir or a flutter, as if shot by an explosive of inconceivable power. The man who is hit has no doubt about the explosive. The plain descriptions of the Southern outrages and the Southern episodes, in the Ingalls voice and manner, caused the audience to shudder,' wrote a New York reporter who had not shuddered for so long that he hardly knew how. On this occasion the ramrod voice hit Senator George, and the reporter goes on to describe the 'half-defiant, half-startled glare' which the stricken Senator, with the ramrod through his soul, aimed at the author of his misery. It is this vocal endowment that helps make Mr. Ingalls as competent a presiding officer as any deliberative body the world ever had. The voice is only part, but it is important. Other factors are namable. His mind works with the quickness, force and perception of a steel trap, and, I may add, with the loud report and fatal effect thereof."

Mr. Ingalls can no easier divest himself of the thralldom of his long line of deeply religious ancestry, than can the Hindoo of the Karma of his Buddhistic creed. He may have modified the terrible orthodoxy of his Puritan progenitors by the independence of his power to ratiocinate, but underlying his apparently antipodean nature there is an earnest love for the right because it is right; for the maintenance of which he would suffer martyrdom like Wyckliffe or Huss, for conscience sake. The current idea of those who do not know him except as a gladiator in the political arena, that he is a rank infidel of the Ingersoll order, is the sheerest nonsense. True he has no faith in the dogmas of any church, but his religion is a decided improvement upon the superstition of his ancestors because it is pure and natural.

He is an owl in his methods of occupying time in which to labor. Dining at six o'clock, the ensuing quarter of the day is the period in which his brain responds most readily to the demands he makes upon it. Then under the inspiration of the midnight lamp are evolved those thoughts which he clothes in his magnificent language. He never smokes during the sunny hours, but when darkness comes on, he lights a cigar when he lights his lamp, consuming as rapidly as his thoughts flow as many as will last until midnight, his hour for retiring. Endowed with enough of this world's goods to place him beyond the possibility of worry for the demands of the morrow, he lives a life of generous ease. Of ease, because to him nothing seems to be a labor. If he were not independent of the common "struggle for bread and butter," an hour or two at his desk would suffice to throw off a manuscript worth an hundred dollars, for his manuscript has an immediate commercial value far in excess of the ordinary man of letters.

He possesses a beautiful home, "Oak Ridge," near

Atchison, which is the abode of refinement, culture and a generous hospitality. There, where the Lares and Penates of his hearth are the affection, sympathy and devoted alliance of a charming family, he is the Ingalls of private life to his limited number of friends, friends in the restricted sense of cordial intimacy, though his acquaintances are many.

He has a relatively large display of "olive branches," sons and daughters, from the age of twenty-five to the baby of six or seven. His wife, a fair, prepossessing woman with all the graces characteristic of the educated American lady, a favorite of society, who also in her motherly qualities emulates Cornelia, the noble consort of Gracchus, is a fit companion of the distinguished husband whom she honors, One of their daughters has already acquired some reputation in the field of literature, with the promise of a brilliant future, upon whose shoulders has fallen the mantle of her father's genius. Their sons have either been graduated or are now attending college. The eldest is a practicing lawyer, another preparing for the profession.

Mr. Ingalls' retirement from active politics was one of the surprises which occasionally fall to the fortunes of enigmatical Kansas. It was a defeat with more honor and glory, paradoxical as it may seem to the uninitiated, than victory to the ordinary candidate. No man ever doffed the toga of senatorship so deeply regretted by the people throughout the country. It may be said to be the story of Jupiter and the frogs re-enacted in the nineteenth century.

He has nothing unkind to say of his defeat. He succumbed as gracefully and cheerfully as any political opponent in times past ever did to him. To use his own words, he was a "victim of the passions of an epoch." "The State," he said, "had undergone a peaceful revolution." This is the strongest language he has ever

employed in referring to it. He does not seem to regard the authors of his defeat as political opponents. He seems to either care nothing for his retirement, or regards his opponents with compassion and pity. Neither does he repine when even now assailed in private life. He steadily pursues the avocation of literature, not stopping to snap or snarl, not even deigning to notice the vicious mutterings around him. It is just as though these imprecations and maledictions were never spoken, for they become enveloped and lost in the reverberation and repercussion of the skies.