the stories they told would not bear repetition here, but many of them had morals which, while exposing the weakness of mankind, stung like a whiplash.  Some were, no doubt, a thousand years old, with just enough of verbal varnish and alterations of names and date to make them new and crisp.  By virtue of the last named application, Lincoln was enabled to draw from Balzac a ‘droll story’ and locating it ‘in Egypt’ (Southern Illinois) or in Indiana, pass it off for a purely original conception. . .  I have seen Judge Treat, who was the very impersonation of gravity itself, sit up till the last and laugh until, as he often expressed it, ’he almost shook his ribs loose.’  The next day he would ascend the bench and listen to Lincoln in a murder trial with all the seeming severity of an English judge in wig and gown."(5)

Lincoln enjoyed the life on the circuit.  It was not that he was always in a gale of spirits; a great deal of the time he brooded.  His Homeric nonsense alternated with fits of gloom.  In spite of his late hours, whether of study or of story-telling, he was an early riser.  “He would sit by the fire having uncovered the coals, and muse and ponder and soliloquize."(6) Besides his favorite Shakespeare, he had a fondness for poetry of a very different sort—­Byron, for example.  And he never tired of a set of stanzas in the minor key beginning:  “Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?"(7)

The hilarity of the circuit was not by any means the whole of its charm for him.  Part of that charm must have been the contrast with his recent failure at Washington.  This world he could master.  Here his humor increased his influence; and his influence grew rapidly.  He was a favorite of judges, jury and the bar.  Then, too, it was a man’s world.  Though Lincoln had a profound respect for women, he seems generally to have been ill at ease in their company.  In what his friends would have called “general society” he did not shine.  He was too awkward, too downright, too lacking in the niceties.  At home, though he now owned a house and was making what seemed to him plenty of money, he was undoubtedly a trial to Mrs. Lincoln’s sense of propriety.  He could not rise with his wife, socially.  He was still what he had become so long before, the favorite of all the men—­good old Abe Lincoln that you could tie to though it rained cats and dogs.  But as to the ladies!  Fashionable people calling on Mrs. Lincoln, had been received by her husband in his shirt-sleeves, and he totally unabashed, as oblivious of discrepancy as if he were a nobleman and not a nobody.(8) The dreadful tradition persists that he had been known at table to put his own knife into the butter.

How safe to assume that many things were said commiserating poor Mrs. Lincoln who had a bear for a husband.  And some people noticed that Lincoln did not come home at week-ends during term-time as often as he might.  Perhaps it meant something; perhaps it did not.  But there could be no doubt that the jovial itinerant life of the circuit was the life for him—­at least in the early ’fifties.  That it was, and also that he was becoming known as a lawyer, is evinced by his refusal of a flattering invitation to enter a prosperous firm in Chicago.