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but for a few minutes. He would tell a story as he passed, and while they were laughing at its climax, would slip away to his room to study. Frequently this work was carried on far into the night. "Placing a candle on a chair at the head of the bed," says Mr. Herndon, "he would study for hours. I have known him to study in this position until two o'clock in the morning. Meanwhile, I and others who chanced to occupy the same room would be safely and soundly asleep." Although he worked so late, "he was in the habit of rising earlier than his brothers of the bar," says Judge Weldon. "On such occasions he was wont to sit by the fire, having uncovered the coals, and muse, ponder, and soliloquize."

But it was not only the law that occupied him. He began a serious course of general education, studying mathematics, astronomy, poetry, as regularly as a school-boy who had lessons to recite. In the winter of 1849-50 he even joined a club of a dozen gentlemen of Springfield who had begun the study of German, the meetings of the class being held in his office.

Much of Lincoln's devotion to study at this period was due to his desire to bring himself in general culture up to the men whom he had been meeting in the East. No man ever realized his own deficiencies in knowledge and experience more deeply than Abraham Lincoln, nor made a braver struggle to correct them. He often acknowledged to his friends the consciousness he had of his own limitations in the simplest matters of life. Mr. H. C. Whitney, one of his old friends, gives a pathetic example of this. Once on the circuit his friends missed him after supper. When he returned, some one asked where he had been.

"Well, I have been to a little show up at the Academy," he said.

"He sat before the ñre," says Mr. Whitney, "and narrated all the sights of that most primitive of county shows, given

chiefly to school children. Next night he was missing again; the show was still in town, and he stole in as before, and entertained us with a description of new sights—a magic lantern, electrical machine, etc. I told him I had seen all these sights at school. 'Yes,' said he sadly, 'I now have an advantage over you, for the first time in my life seeing these things which are, of course, common to those who had, what I did not, a chance at an education when they were young.''

It was to make up for the "chance at an education" which he did not have in youth that Abraham Lincoln at forty years of age, after having earned the reputation of being one of the ablest politicians in Illinois, spent his leisure in study.

CHAPTER XV

LINCOLN ON THE CIRCUIT-HIS HUMOR AND PERSUASIVENESS HIS MANNER OF PREPARING CASES, EXAMINING WITNESSES, AND ADDRESSING JURIES

WHEN in 1849 Lincoln decided to abandon politics finally and to devote himself to the law, he had been practising for thirteen years. In spite of the many interruptions electioneering and office-holding had caused he was well-established. Rejoining his partner Herndon-the firm of Lincoln and Herndon had been only a name during Lincoln's term in Washington-he took up the law with a singleness of purpose which had never before characterized his practice.

Lincoln's headquarters were in Springfield, but his practice was itinerant. The arrangements for the administration of justice in Illinois in the early days were suited to the conditions of the country, the State being divided into judicial circuits including more or less territory according to the population. To each circuit a judge was appointed, who each spring and fall travelled from county-seat to countyseat to hold court. With the judge travelled a certain number of the best-known lawyers of the district. Each lawyer had, of course, a permanent office in one of the county-seats, and often at several of the others he had partners, usually young men of little experience, for whom he acted as counsel in special cases. This peripatetic court prevailed in Illinois until the beginning of the fifties; but for many years after, when the towns had grown so large that a clever lawyer might have enough to do in his own county, a few lawyers,

Lincoln among them, who from long association felt that the circuit was their natural habitat refused to leave it.

The circuit which Lincoln travelled was known as the "Eighth Judicial Circuit." It included fifteen counties in 1845, though the territory has since been divided into more. It was about one hundred and fifty miles long by as many broad. There were no railroads in the Eighth Circuit until about 1854, and the court travelled on horseback or in carriages. Lincoln had no horse in the early days of his practice. It was his habit then to borrow one, or to join a company of a half dozen or more in hiring a "three-seated spring wagon." Later he owned a turn-out of his own, which figures in nearly all the traditions of the Eighth Circuit; the horse being described as "poky" and the buggy as "rattling."

There was much that was irritating and uncomfortable in the circuit-riding of the Illinois court, but there was more which was amusing to a temperament like Lincoln's. The freedom, the long days in the open air, the unexpected if trivial adventures, the meeting with wayfarers and settlers -all was an entertainment to him. He found humor and human interest on the route where his companions saw noth.. ing but commonplaces. "He saw the ludicrous in an assemblage of fowls," says H. C. Whitney, one of his fellowitinerants, "in a man spading his garden, in a clothes-line full of clothes, in a group of boys, in a lot of pigs rooting at a mill door, in a mother duck teaching her brood to swim-in everything and anything." The sympathetic observations of these long rides furnished humorous settings for some of his best stories. If frequently on these trips he fell into sombre reveries and rode with head bent, ignoring his companions, generally he took part in all the frolicking which went on, joining in practical jokes, singing noisily with the rest, sometimes even playing a Jew's-harp.

When the county-seat was reached, the bench and bar

quickly settled themselves in the town tavern. It was usually a large two-story house with big rooms and long verandas. There was little exclusiveness possible in these hostelries.

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FACSIMILE OF MAP OF CIRCUIT WHICH LINCOLN TRAVELLED IN PRACTISING LAW.

Ordinarily judge and lawyer slept two in a bed, and thres or four beds in a room. They ate at the common table with jurors, witnesses, prisoners out on bail, travelling peddlers,

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