“At the table I told him a story and got a little laugh out of him.  He stayed with me three weeks, choring around the place and taking it easy.  He read all the books I had, until you and Doc Allen came with the law books.  Then he pitched into them.  I think he has changed a good deal since Ann died.  He talks a lot about God and the hereafter.”

In October young Mr. Lincoln returned to his surveying, and in the last month of the year to Vandalia for an extra session of the Legislature, where he took a stand against the convention system of nominating candidates for public office.  Samson went to Vandalia for a visit with him and to see the place before the session ended.  The next year, in a letter to his brother, he says: 

“Vandalia is a small, crude village.  It has a strong flavor of whisky, profanity and tobacco.  The night after I got there I went to a banquet with Abe Lincoln.  Heard a lot about the dam nigger-loving Yankees who were trying to ruin the state and country with abolition.  There were some stories like those we used to hear in the lumber camp, and no end of powerful talk, in which the names of God and the Savior were roughly handled.  A few of the statesmen got drunk, and after the dinner was over two of them jumped on the table and danced down the whole length of it, shattering plates and cups and saucers and glasses.  Nobody seemed to be able to stop them.  I hear that they had to pay several hundred dollars for the damage done.  You will be apt to think that there is too much liberty here in the West, and perhaps that is so, but the fact is these men are not half so bad as they seem to be.  Lincoln tells me that they are honest almost to a man and sincerely devoted to the public good as they see it.  I asked Abe Lincoln, who all his life has associated with rough tongued, drinking men, how he had managed to hold his own course and keep his talk and habits so clean.

“‘Why, the fact is,’ said he, ’I have associated with the people who lived around me only part of the time, but I have never stopped associating with myself and with Washington and Clay and Webster and Shakespeare and Burns and DeFoe and Scott and Blackstone and Parsons.  On the whole, I’ve been in pretty good company.’

“He has not yet accomplished much in the Legislature.  I don’t think that he will until some big issue comes along.  ’I’m not much of a hand at hunting squirrels,’ he said to me the other day.  ’Wait till I see a bear.’  The people of Vandalia and Springfield have never seen him yet.  They don’t know him as I do.  But they all respect him—­just for his good fellowship, honesty and decency.  I guess that every fellow with a foul mouth hates himself for it and envies the man who isn’t like him.  They begin to see his skill as a politician, which has shown itself in the passage of a bill removing the capitol to Springfield.  Abe Lincoln was the man who put it through.  But he has not yet uncovered his best talents.  Mark my word, some day Lincoln will be a big man.