Bim and her mother returned to Chicago on the stage, the former to take a place in the store as the representative of Samson’s interest.

Harry was three years in the wilderness trying to regain his health.  Success came to him in the last year of his banishment.

Toward the end of it he received a letter from Mr. Lincoln.  It was written soon after that curious climax in the courting of Mary Todd.  In this letter he said: 

* * * * *

“I am serving my last term in the Legislature.  I learn that you are in better health and I hope that you will have the strength and inclination to return soon and be a candidate for my seat in the house.  Samson will not do it, being so busy with large affairs.  You are young.  You have won distinction in the service of your country.  You have studied the problems of the county and the state.  Samson and Baker and Logan and Browning agree with me that you are the man for the place.

“As for myself I am going to be married in a year or so.  I shall have to give all my time to the practice of the law.  I am now in partnership with Stephen T. Logan and am slowly clearing my conscience of debt.  I have done what I could for the state and for Sangamon County.  It hasn’t been much.  I want you to take up the burden, if you can, until I get free of my debts at least.  By and by I may jump into the ring again.”

* * * * *

Harry was glad to obey the summons.  Soon after the arrival of Mr. Lincoln’s letter his doctor gave the young man what he called “an honorable discharge.”  The magic of youth and its courage and of good air had wrought a change of which the able doctor had had little hope in the beginning.

In his travels through the great forest Harry had met David Parish and Stephen Van Renssalaer at whose homes on the shore of the St. Lawrence he had spent many a happy, summer day.  Three years had passed since that fateful morning on the prairie.  Through the winters he had lived in a comfortable hunter’s camp on the shore of Lake Placid.  Summers he had wandered with a guide and canoe through the lakes and rivers of the wilderness hunting and fishing and reading the law books which he had borrowed from Judge Fine of Ogdensburg.  Each summer he worked down the Oswegatchie to that point for a visit with his new friends.  The history of every week had been written to Bim and her letters had reached him at the points where he was wont to rest in his travels.  The lovers had not lost their ardor.  Theirs was the love “that hopes and endures and is patient.”

On a day in June, 1841, he boarded a steamboat at Ogdensburg on his way to Chicago.  He arrived in the evening and found Samson at the home of Bim and her mother—­a capacious and well-furnished house on Dearborn Street.  Bim was then a little over twenty-five years old.  A letter from John Wentworth says that she was “an exquisite bit of womanhood learned in the fine arts of speech and dress and manner.”  He spoke also of her humor and originality and of her gift for business “which amounted to absolute genius.”