the court-room, while Smith, who had unperceived made his way up to the feet of the judge, laid his head upon his knee and wept like a child.  “Never,” said Douglas, “was I so determined to effect a result as then.  Had Smith been taken from my protection, it would have been only when I lay dead upon the floor.”  The fact that he had no right to appoint a sheriff was not one of the “points of consideration.”  “How shall I execute my will?” was probably the only question that suggested itself to his mind at the time, and the logic of the answer in no way troubled him.  The dignity of the bench was always upheld by Judge Douglas during the sitting of the court; but he was no stickler for form or ceremony elsewhere.

A friend tells an amusing anecdote illustrative of his daring and somewhat foolhardy spirit, even in mature life.  Mr. Douglas, then a judge of the Supreme Court of Illinois, was one of a number of passengers who, on the crack steamboat “Andrew Jackson,” were going down the Mississippi.  The steamer was detained several hours at Natchez, where she was supplied with wood and water, and during the delay a huge, hard-fisted boatman, somewhat the worse for a poor article of strychnine whiskey, made himself very conspicuous and exceedingly obnoxious by the continual iteration of his intense desire to fight some one.  He was fearful that he would “ruin,” if his pugilistic wants were not immediately attended to, and in manner more earnest than agreeable invited one and all to “come ashore and have the conceit taken out” of them.  From the descriptive catalogue he gave of his own merits, the passengers gathered that he was “a roarer,” “a regular bruiser,” “half alligator, half steamboat, half snapping-turtle, with a leetle dash of chain-lightning thrown in,” and were evidently afraid of him; when the Judge, who had been quietly smoking on the deck, stepped out upon the quay, and, approaching the bully, said, with a peculiarly dry manner,—­

“Who might you be, my big chicken, eh?”

“I’m a high-pressure steamer,” roared the astonished boatman.

“And I’m a snag,” replied Douglas, as he pitched into him; and before the fellow had time to reflect, he lay sprawling in the mud.

A loud shout, mingled with derisive laughter, burst from the spectators, all of whom knew the Judge; and while the discomfited braggart limped sorely off, the passengers carried Douglas to the bar, where, for hours after, a general series of jollifications ensued, and he who a few days before had sat the embodiment of judicial dignity on the supreme bench now vied with a motley crowd of steamboat-passengers in song and story.  As a judge he was as he should be; but he was a judge only while literally on the bench.

The decisions of Judge Douglas were recognized always as able and impartial; but his habit of “log-rolling,” or, as the extreme Westerners call it, “honey-fugling” for votes and support, had so grown upon him, that his sincere friends feared lest he would sink too low, and in the end defeat himself.  He had ascertained, however, that success was in the gift of the multitude, and to them he ever remained faithful.