III.

LIFE ON THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT.

"Life on the circuit was a gay one. It was rich with incidents. Lincoln loved it.- Herndon.

The history of the life of Abraham Lincoln should be analyzed and separated, for purposes of consideration, into five several epochs, as follows, viz.:

First-That portion which commences with his birth, on February 12, 1809.

Second-That part which began about April 1st, 1830, when he stood in front of the Court House, in Decatur, Illinois, by the side of four yoke of gaunt oxen, and a rude wagon, in which was contained all the property that Lincoln and his father owned, in the world.

Third-That portion which commenced about March 15, 1837, when he rode from New Salem to Springfield on a borrowed horse, and having as his sole property in the universe a pair of old saddle-bags, containing two or three law books and a few pieces of nondescript clothing, and with about seven dollars in his pocket; and being kindly offered the use of one-half a bed, in a room over Speed's store, put his few goods there, and coming down, said, "Well, I'm moved."

Fourth-That portion commencing on May 29, 1854, when he was trying an inconsequential replevin suit in Danville, and President Pierce signed and made a law of the Kansas-Nebraska bill.

Fifth-Finally, that portion which commenced with taking the Inauguration Oath, and ended with his life.

As I have before stated, I first saw Lincoln at "Bailey's" tavern, on the road from Danville to Urbana, in Illinois, on June 3d, 1854, or five days after the commencement of the fourth era, and my actual acquaintance with him commenced on October 24th, 1854, and lasted till about October 10th, 1861, or seven years.

During this fourth era of his life, he was undergoing training for the grandest mission ever entrusted by Providence to a single man, and it must of necessity be prolific of interest, generally to any scholar or patriot, and specifically to the student of American history.

The living witnesses of that eventful period of his life are fast disappearing, and will, soon, all be gone; and no one who ever traveled on the circuit with him during that time. has ever given any narrative of it, except Leonard Swett in a lecture, and Lamon in a few brief sentences in his biography.

The judicial circuit, in which Lincoln lived, had, anterior to 1853, consisted of fourteen counties, but in that year had been reduced to eight, viz.: Sangamon, Logan, Tazewell, Woodford, McLean, Dewitt, Champaign and Vermillion.

Lincoln was the only lawyer who traveled over the entire circuit; he, however, made it a practice to attend every Court, and to remain till the end. This lasted till 1858, when the circuit was radically changed, and Lincoln's attention became much engrossed with politics, which weaned him from a close application to law.

It is to me an interesting reflection, that probably onehalf of my readers are not of sufficient age to recollect the time when Mr. Lincoln lived or died.

It also seems interesting to me, now, to reflect that before he was known to fame, I used to traverse, periodically, the wild Illinois prairies with this greatest of men,—these prairies now teeming with a dense and busy life, then quite as desolate and almost as solitary as at Creation's dawn,—that our means of travel were limited to home-made vehicles, that we were accustomed to put up at homely farm-houses and vil

lage inns; and sleep two in a bed, and eight in a room; that our business was transacted, and our daily bread earned, in unkempt court-rooms, where, ten months in the year, the town boys played at marbles or rudimentary circus; that our offices were ambulatory, being located now on the sunny side of a Court House, then under the shade of a friendly tree, and, anon, on the edge of a sidewalk.

It is strange to contemplate that in these comparatively recent, but primitive days, Mr. Lincoln's whole attention should have been engrossed in petty controversies or acrimonious disputes between neighbors about trifles; that he should have puzzled his great mind in attempting to decipher who was the owner of a litter of pigs, or which party was to blame for the loss of a flock of sheep, by foot rot; or whether some irascible spirit was justified in avowing that his enemy had committed perjury; yet I have known him to give as earnest attention to such matters, as, later, he gave to affairs of State.

Railways had just made their advent when I first settled in that circuit, and five out of eight county seats were reached by modes other than the rail:-chiefly by private conveyance. Settlements were mainly restricted to the watercourses and timber groves, and the broad prairies were in the same condition of virginity and desolation that they had been since Columbus saw the welcome light at San Salvador.

The county seats were located at small and primitive villages, and the business of the court was meagre and uninteresting. The only law library in the Circuit, beyond a few small collections of law-books, was at Springfield, and we depended mainly for our references on the old Statutes of 1845, and on the ten volumes of Illinois reports, which, at that time, embraced all of our adjudged and settled law.

If the business on our Circuit was meagre, the good cheer and conviviality were exuberant: and if we did not make much money, our wants "were few and our pleasures simple," and our life on the Circuit was like a holiday.