from the daily visits to the drug-stores on the public square, which were the recognized rendezvous of Springfield politicians and lawyers, to his weekly attendance at the First Presbyterian Church. That he was as regular in his attendance on the latter as on the former, all his old neighbors testify. In fact, Lincoln, all his life, went regularly to church. The serious attention which he gave the sermons he heard is shown in a well-authenticated story of a visit he made in 1837, with a company of friends, to a camp-meeting held six miles west of Springfield at the “Salem Church." The sermon on this occasion was preached by one of the most vigorous and original individuals in the pulpit of that day-the Rev. Dr. Peter Akers. In this discourse was a remarkable and prophetic passage, long remembered by those who heard it. The speaker prophesied the downfall of castes, the end of tyrannies, and the crushing out of slavery. As Lincoln and his friends returned home there was a long discussion of the sermon. "It was the most instructive sermon, and he is the most impressive preacher, I have ever heard," Lincoln said. "It is wonderful that God has given such power to men. I firmly believe his interpretation of prophecy, so far as I understand it, and especially about the breaking down of civil and religious tyrannies; and, odd as it may seem, when he described those changes and revolutions, I was deeply impressed that I should be somehow strangely mixed up with them." If Lincoln was not at this period a man of orthodox beliefs, he certainly was, if we accept his own words, profoundly religious. In the letters which passed be tween Lincoln and Speed in 1841 and 1842, when the two men were doubting their own hearts and wrestling with their disillusions and forebodings, Lincoln frequently expressed the idea that the Almighty had sent their suffering for a special purpose. When Speed finally acknowledged himself happily married, Lincoln wrote to him: "I always was superstitious; I believe God made me one of the instruments of bringing your Fanny and you together, which union I have no doubt he had foreordained." Then, referring to his own troubled heart, he added: "Whatever He designs He will do for me yet. 'Stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord,' is my text just now." Only a few months after Lincoln decided to settle permanently in Springfield his father, Thomas Lincoln, fell dangerously ill. Lincoln in writing to John Johnston, his step-brother, said: "I sincerely hope father may recover his health, but, at all events, tell him to remember to call upon and confide in our great and good and merciful Maker, who will not turn away from him in any extremity. He notes the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our heads, and He will not forget the dying man who puts his trust in Him." Lincoln's return to the law was characterized by a marked change in his habits. He gave much more attention to study than he ever had before. His colleagues in Springfield and on the circuit noticed this change. After court closed in the town on the circuit, and the lawyers were gathered in the bar-room or on the veranda of the tavern, telling stories and chaffing one another, Lincoln would join them, though often 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 limitations in even the simplest matters of life. Mr. H. C. Whitney, one of his old friends, gives a touching example of this. They were on the circuit and Lincoln's 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 fire," 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 later 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 PERSUAS IVENESS-HIS MANNER OF PREPARING CASES, 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 Washingtonhe 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 county-seat holding 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 countyseats, 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 |