The records of this legislature show nothing noteworthy.  Lincoln was very inappropriately placed on the Committee on Public Accounts and Expenditures; also it is recorded that he introduced a resolution to obtain for the State a part of the proceeds of the public lands sold within it.  What has chiefly interested the chroniclers is, that at this session he first saw Stephen A. Douglas, then a lobbyist, and said of him:  “He is the least man I ever saw.”  Lincoln’s part seems to have been rather that of an observer than of an actor.  The account given is that he was watching, learning, making acquaintances, prudently preparing for future success, rather than endeavoring to seize it too greedily.  In fact, there is reason to believe that his thoughts were intent on far other matter than the shaping of laws and statutes.  For to this period belongs the episode of Ann Rutledge.  The two biographers whose personal knowledge is the best regard this as the one real romance of Lincoln’s life.  Heretofore he had held himself shyly aloof from women’s society, but this maiden won his heart.  She comes before posterity amid a glamour of rhetorical description, which attributes to her every grace of form and feature, every charm of character and intellect.  She was but a schoolgirl of seventeen years when two men became her lovers; a year or more afterward she became engaged to one of them, but before they could be married he made a somewhat singular excuse for going to New York on family affairs.  His absence was prolonged and his letters became few.  People said that the girl had been deceived, and Lincoln began to hope that the way was clearing for him.  But under the prolonged strain Miss Rutledge’s health broke down, and on August 25, 1835, she died of brain fever.  Lincoln was allowed to see her as she lay near her end.  The effect upon him was grievous.  Many declared him crazy, and his friends feared that he might go so far as to take his own life; they watched him closely, and one of them at last kindly took him away from the scene of his sufferings for a while, and bore him constant and cheering company.  In time the cloud passed, but it seems certain that on only one or two other occasions in his life did that deep melancholy, which formed a permanent background to his temperament, take such overmastering, such alarming and merciless possession of him.  He was afflicted sorely with a constitutional tendency to gloom, and the evil haunted him all his life long.  Like a dark fog-bank it hung, always dull and threatening, on the verge of his horizon, sometimes rolling heavily down upon him, sometimes drawing off into a more or less remote distance, but never wholly disappearing.  Every one saw it in his face and often felt it in his manner, and few pictures of him have been made so bad as not in some degree to present it.  The access of it which was brought on by this unhappy love affair was somewhat odd and uncouth in its manifestations, but was so genuine and sincere that one feels that he was truly undergoing the baptism of a great sorrow.