The winter came down; but I was better prepared for it than I was the year before.  My house with its walls a foot thick of solid oak and tightly plastered against the penetrating winds kept out the cold.  And my fireplaces built under my very eye threw a steady heat into the rooms.  I was giving parties from time to time and attending them as well.  Douglas always came.  He was unfailingly the life of the party.  He had reenforced his political successes with a genuine hold upon the hearts of the young people and the older people.  He was attacked weekly by the Whig newspaper.  But he was not without defense.  Almost upon arriving at Jacksonville he had written a letter of praise to the editor of a newly started journal.  The editor was greatly pleased at this spontaneous expression of interest and had become Douglas’ friend and stanch champion.  Ah!  Douglas was only manipulating.  He had written this letter to win a newspaper to his support.  The wily schemer!  “Genius has come into our midst,” wrote the editor.  “No one can doubt this who heard Mr. Douglas expound Democratic doctrine in his wonderful debate with John Wyatt.  This country is richer for having attracted Douglas to it.  He is here to stay.  And he will be one of the great men of the country as President Jackson is now the greatest figure since Washington; and Illinois will send him forth as her son to speak and to act on the great questions that are already beginning to fill the minds of the people.”

Douglas often came out to stay for the night or for a day or two.  He had little law business, but his energies were always employed in shaping his powers toward a participation in the politics of the country.  His superhuman energy was intensified by the fact that he had been deprived of an opportunity to educate himself.  It was the gadfly that drove him forward with such restless industry.  I could see that he had no patience for a detailed study of the law; that he might be ignorant of the technical steps to be taken in the collection of a promissory note, but he would know something about the resources of a treaty; that if he did not know how to settle the title to a farmer’s field, he had considered ways to put at rest any claim of England to the territory of the Oregon.  Yet he had to live as a lawyer before he could flourish as a statesman.  And he had become the prosecuting attorney.  His enemies said it was by a trick; that he had had the state law changed so that the legislature could appoint him state’s attorney for the district of Jacksonville.  The accusation proved too much.  Douglas was not quite twenty-two when he reached this office.  He had been in the state but two years, not quite that.  How had such a youth first won the confidence of enough people who wished to give him this office and were able to do it; and then won the legislature to do the extraordinary thing of changing the law to give him the office, while at the same time supplanting a seasoned and experienced man in the place?  How?  Was every one corrupt, people and legislature?  But it was February and he was the prosecuting attorney for the people.