Mr. Williams thought that Douglas was getting deeper and deeper into trouble.  The Compromises of 1850 were only partially satisfactory.  They had not appeased the Abolitionists.  A new party was growing up around the discontent which those Compromises had created.  Mr. Pierce’s administration had met some disturbances, though it had sufficed in the main.  He had gone into office with the support of many of the best men of the country, as, for example, Bryant, the poet, and of course Hawthorne, his boyhood friend.  Since his election the Whig party had gone to pieces.  There was no party but the Democratic party.  Beside it nothing but factions and groups trying to find a way to unite.  Chief of these was the Know-nothings who stood for what they called Americanism, and raised an opposition to Catholicism.  Next were the Abolitionists.  There were smaller bodies, all inharmonious.  I felt that Douglas was destined to drive these lawless resolutes into defeat and become President.  He was not in Chicago now; but I was soon to see him.  In the meanwhile I thought I would go to see Reverdy and Sarah.

Reverdy was now in the middle fifties, and aging.  Sarah looked thin and worn.  She was really an old woman.  Amos was a man.  He had taken up with farming near Jacksonville.  Jonas was nearing his twentieth year.  The story was for the most part told for them all as one family.

Reverdy and I drove about the country; and it had changed so much.  Boundaries had disappeared; forests had vanished.  Familiar houses had given way to pretentious residences, many built in the southern style of Tennessee or Kentucky.  Great barns dotted the landscape.  Yet the pioneer was still here.  My old fiddler in the woods had aged, but he was much himself.  He played for us.  And we went to the log hut, in which I had lived during my first winter on the farm.  Here it was with its chimney of sticks, its single room of all uses, the very symbol of humble life, of solitariness in the woods.  I had lived here when the country was wild, but Reverdy said that before my coming to Illinois it was wilder still and more lonely.  “What do you think,” said Reverdy, “of a man and a woman living here in the most primitive days; no church, no schools.  No doctors to relieve suffering, or scarcely to attend a birth.  No books, or but few.  The long winters of snow; silence except when terrible storms broke over a roof like this.  Imagine yourself born and reared in such a place; all the family sleeping in this one room in the bitter cold of winter.  Sickness without medicine.  Imagine Douglas living here.  His early youth had its hardships; but after all he has had a comfortable life.  He soon became prosperous.  Now he is rich.  What public man has become so rich?  Yes, here is the American cotter’s home; and so many boys have come out of a place like this and gone to the wars or into public life.  It is America’s symbol.”