Speed remained in Kentucky; Lincoln was too poor for visits of pleasure; and Speed was not a man who cared for political life; but the memorials, from which the above quotations have been taken, of Lincoln’s lasting friendship with Speed and his kind mother, who gave Lincoln a treasured Bible, and his kind young wife, who made her husband’s friend her own, and whose violet, dropped into her husband’s letter to him just as he was sealing it, was among the few flowers that Lincoln ever appreciated, throw the clearest light that we can anywhere obtain on the inner mind of Lincoln.

As may have been foreseen, Mary Todd and he had met again on a friendly footing.  A managing lady is credited with having brought about a meeting between them, but evidently she did not do it till Lincoln was at least getting desirous to be managed.  He was much absorbed at this time in law business, to which since his breakdown he had applied himself more seriously.  It was at this period too that his notable address on temperance was given.  Soon after his meetings with Miss Todd began again he involved himself in a complication of a different kind.  He had written, partly, it seems, for the young lady’s amusement, some innocent if uninteresting political skits relating to some question about taxes.  This brought on him an unexpected challenge from a fiery but diminutive revenue official, one Colonel Shields, a prominent Democratic politician.  Lincoln availed himself of the right of the challenged to impose ridiculous conditions of combat, partly no doubt in fun, but with the sensible object also of making sure that he could disarm his antagonist with no risk of harm to the little man.  The tangled controversy which ensued as to how and by whose fault the duel eventually fell through has nothing in it now, but the whole undignified business seems to have given Lincoln lasting chagrin, and worried him greatly at a time when it would have been well that he should be cheerful.  At last on November 4, 1842, when Lincoln was nearly thirty-three, he was safely married.  The wedding, held, according to the prevailing custom, in a private house, was an important function, for it was the first Episcopalian wedding that good society in Springfield had witnessed.  Malicious fortune brought in a ludicrous incident at the last moment, for when in the lawyerlike verbiage of the then American Prayer-Book the bridegroom said, “With this ring I thee endow with all my goods, chattels, lands and tenements,” old Judge Brown of the Illinois Supreme Court, who had never heard the like, impatiently broke in, “God Almighty, Lincoln!  The statute fixes all that.”