as a fresh mind who can value the truth of things about it.  Douglas may become a very great figure; but I can’t help but believe that his restless life may bring him to disaster.  Let us hope it won’t.  Meantime I wish for happiness for you.  Your letters are very interesting and I am always glad to get them.  Write me as often as you can, give me pictures of your life, the people.  And do move to Chicago.  Your friend, Abigail.”

I read this letter over more than once with reference to its characterization of Douglas.  I could not share her opinions.  Why could she not see that Douglas had always done his best?  After all, what of the law?  Douglas could not be patient with the rules that related to a land title while his thoughts were far afield in plans for the territorial greatness of his country.  Meantime he had to earn his bread.  He had never stooped to dishonor, to chicanery.  He had caught at the driftwood of supporting offices in his swimming of the new stream of primitive life.  He was poor.  He had enemies.  His eye was upon an eminence.  He had to make the best of the materials at hand.

I understood Douglas’ difficulties because I had had difficulties of my own.  I had not faced the world with poverty.  But I had faced it with Zoe.  I had not battled in issues which were influenced by the negro, but I had a social experience which Zoe had made and complicated for me.  If Douglas was now in an office that belittled him, I was sorry, for I was his friend in all loyalty.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Scarcely had Douglas settled as Secretary of State, when he resigned the office to become Justice of the Supreme Court of Illinois.  Abigail wrote me a most amusing and ironical letter on this sudden shift of his activities.  “What do you think now?” was her query.  “I think he is as well fitted to be judge as to be Secretary of State, which is not at all.”

When I wrote to Abigail I had news to tell her with reference to the farm.  I believed I had found a purchaser in Springfield; and my trading talks with Washburton, for that was his name, had taken me over there a number of times.  On one of these occasions I saw Douglas.  He had been presiding over a proceeding that had something to do with the Mormons, in which he favored them.  He was charged with placating their interests to win them to his political fortunes.  “It was nothing of the sort,” said Douglas.  “I only did my duty.  What have I to gain by favoring them?  There are a great many more people who hate them than those who have any use for them.  Even my enemies know that.  Do you know they say, Jim, that I grabbed this judgeship by some high-handed method.  It’s all a lie.  I can do nothing to please some people.  They don’t like my conduct on the bench.  You know how crude things are here.  My throne is a platform with a table; and the audience sits so close to me that I can almost touch them.  The other day I walked off the platform and sat for a moment with one of the spectators, an old friend.  Somebody wrote this up for the newspaper and made a terrible fuss about it.  I cannot please some people, no matter what I do.”