MISCELLANY JOHN JAMES INGALLS. The first-born of Elias Theodore Ingalls and his wife Eliza Chase. Of Puritan ancestry. Born at Middletown, Massachusetts, December 29, 1833. Was United States Senator from Kansas eighteen years from 1873 to 1891. Died of bronchitis, at Las Vegas, New Mexico, August 16, 1900. Is buried at Atchison. Statue placed in Hall of Fame, Washington, by act of the Kansas Legislature. Ingalls was fond of walking. He loved to wander solitary and alone. About Atchison he strolled over prairies, along bluffs, through fields, under the trees of forest and orchard. When he was made Chairman of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, he walked about Washington constantly, and made himself familiar with its every feature and want. Ingalls wrote the Kansas Magazine articles -15 in his home on a small table in the living-room. The children were all about him, but seemed not to annoy him or distract his attention. He wrote slowly that is, composed slowly. Mrs. Ingalls says he "wrote and tore up" his articles until they conformed to the requirements of his exact and discriminating taste. One competent to speak said of Ingalls: He knew language as the devout Moslem knows his Koran. All the deeps and shallows of the sea of words were sounded and surveyed by him and duly marked upon the chart of his great mentality. In the presence of an audience he was a magician; under the power of his magic, syllables became scorpions - an inflection became an indictment. And with words he builded temples of thought that excited at first the wonder and at all times the admiration of the world of literature and statesmanship. He was emperor in the realm of expression. That Ingalls was an acute observer of men and events is shown by his analysis of the character of the Kansas man: It has been sometimes obscurely intimated that the typical Kansan lacks in reserve, and occasion ally exhibits a tendency to exaggeration in dwelling upon the development of the state and the benefits and burdens of its citizenship. Censorious scoffers, actuated by envy, jealousy, malignity, and other evil passions, have intimated that he unduly vaunteth himself; that he brags and becomes vainglorious; that he is given to bounce, tall talk, and magniloquence. There have not been wanting those who affirm that he magnifies his calamities as well as his blessings, and desires nothing so much as to have the name of Kansas in any capacity in the ears and mouths of men. Such accusations are well calculated to make the judicious grieve. They result from a misconception of the man and his environment. The normal condition of the genuine Kansan is that of shy and sensitive diffidence. He suffers from excess of modesty. He blushes too easily. There is nothing he dislikes so much as to hear himself talk. He hides his light under a bushel. He keeps as near the tail-end of the procession as possible. He never advertises. He bloweth not his own horn, and is indifferent to the bandwagon. Ingalls was epigramattic. He said of Garland, Attorney-General of the United States under Cleveland: "General Garland is a great lawyer |