-aim lower, and the common people will understand you. They are the ones you want to reach. The educated and refined people will understand you anyway." His reading and observation had taught him that one of the best ways to make a point stick in memory is to illustrate it by a story, and he constantly told stories, both in his speeches and conversation. Court in the old eighth circuit, with Lincoln and his colleagues traveling about, eating and sleeping together, and trying their cases together, day after day, week in and week out, and telling stories wherever they met, was not a dignified, solemn place like the chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States. Lincoln was irre pressible. When he came on the scene he would introduce himself in this fashion, "Well, fellows, are n't you glad I've come?" and then, out of his unlimited store, he would bring forth a new story that would sometimes make the good-natured judge adjourn court to hear it.

The clerk of the court tells how he was once fined for laughing out in the midst of a trial. "Lincoln had just come in," he tells us, "and leaning over my desk had told me a story so irresistibly funny that I broke into a loud laugh. Judge Davis called me to order in haste, as he said sternly, This must be stopped. Mr. Lincoln, you are constantly disturbing this court with your stories. Mr. Clerk, you may fine yourself five dollars for your disturbance.' I apologized, but told the judge the story was worth the money. A few minutes later he called me to him. What was that story Lincoln told you?' he asked. I told him, and he laughed aloud in spite of himself. 'You need not pay that fine,' he said."

In the earlier years of his practice, Lincoln used his

stories with great effect in his jury speeches. Once he was trying to make plain that his client, on trial for striking a man, had done the deed in an effort to defend himself, and illustrated his point by saying that his client was in the fix of the man who while carrying a pitchfork along a country road was suddenly attacked by a vicious dog. In the trouble that followed, the prongs of the pitchfork killed the dog. "What made you kill my dog?" the farmer angrily cried. "What made him try to bite me?" "But why did n't you go at him with the other end of the pitchfork?" "6 Why did n't he come at me with the other end of the dog?" The jury saw what self-defense meant.

In one of his cases he made fun of an opponent's long speeches. "My friend," he said, "is peculiarly constructed. When he begins to speak, his brain stops working. He makes me think of a little old steamboat we used to have on the Sangamon River in the early days. It had a five-foot boiler and a seven-foot whistle, and every time it whistled, it stopped."

His practical sense and his understanding of human nature enabled him to save the life of the son of his old Clary's Grove friend, Jack Armstrong, who was on trial for murder. Lincoln, learning of it, went to the old mother who had been kind to him in the days of his boyhood poverty and promised her that he would get her boy free. The witnesses were sure that Armstrong was guilty, and one of them declared that he had seen the fatal blow struck. It was late at night, he said, and the light of the full moon had made it possible for him to see the crime committed. Lincoln, on cross-examination, asked him only questions enough to make the jury see that it was the full moon that made it possible for the witness to see what occurred, got him to say two

or three times that he was sure of it, and seemed to give up any further effort to save the boy. But when the evidence was finished and Lincoln's time came to make his argument, he called for an almanac, which the clerk of the court had ready for him, and handed it to the jury. They saw at once that on the night of the murder there was no moon at all. They were satisfied that the witness had told what was not true. Lincoln's case

was won.

66

He argued his cases in a straightforward way, without oratorical effort, shunning long words and strange expressions, using the language of the Bible, or illustrating what he had to say with an apt story, talking with the court and the jury as a man would talk familiarly with a group of old friends and neighbors, and demonstrating" his points as Euclid had taught him. Mr. Herndon, who continued as Lincoln's law partner during the later years of his life, has told of his way of keeping a crowd amused: "I have seen him surrounded by as many as two or three hundred persons, all deeply interested in the outcome of a story. His power of mimicry and his manner of recital were remarkable. All his features seemed to take part in the performance. As he neared the point of the joke, or story, every vestige of seriousness disappeared from his face. His little gray eyes sparkled; a smile seemed to gather up, curtain-like, the corners of his mouth; his frame quivered with suppressed excitement; and when the point or nub' of the story, as he called it, came, no one's laugh was heartier than his."

In those days he seemed not to know, or care, how he looked. He was poor, and he had a growing family. His very poverty made friends for him. His dress was simple. His hat was rusty and faded with age. He

wore a gray shawl. His coat hung loosely on his gaunt frame, and his trousers were always too short. He carried a faded green umbrella, with the letters “A. Lincoln," sewed on in white muslin. Its handle was gone, and it was usually held together with a bit of string.

With all his traveling about over the circuit, there were still four or five months in every year when court was not in session. This gave the lawyers time for other things. Lincoln's spare days were spent "mousing about the libraries in the State House." He was studying the Constitution of the United States, making himself familiar with his country's history, and, in season and out of season, studying the slavery question. It was not in his years of successful law practice, when he was one of the leaders of the bar in Illinois, that he proved his greatness as a lawyer, so much as it was in his complete mastery of the Constitution in its relation to the slavery question, as he afterward revealed it in his debates with Douglas. In the prairies of Illinois, sometimes dreaming, sometimes thinking deeply, this country attorney became one of the learned con stitutional lawyers of his time.

CHAPTER IX

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS BORN

BUSY as he was in the practice of law, Lincoln kept on studying the signs of the times. The speeches of abolitionist leaders came into his hands and he read regularly two Southern newspapers. He wrote an occasional political editorial for a Springfield paper and he made a few campaign speeches, but his real interest was in the practice of his profession.

While Lincoln was a looker-on at the great drama of national politics, his old-time rival, Stephen A. Douglas, Senator from Illinois, was becoming one of the chief actors, restraining, as well as he could, the growing feeling of discontent that the anti-slavery spirit in the North had bred, and casting about for some safe way in which the slave States might be held loyal to the Union. Already the politicians in the South were threatening to carry their States out of the Union unless the demands of slavery were granted. Already Douglas was dreaming that he himself might be the means of holding South and North together, and become the choice of both sections for President.

The admission of Texas as a slave State had strengthened the slave power, but it had not satisfied it. The threats of secession continued. Clay and Webster and Douglas and others of those who dreaded war and were willing to yield almost anything to preserve the Union, devised a new measure called the Compromise of 1850, the effect of which was to increase the feeling between the North and the South. One of its features was the