Stephen stuck close to Jim.  He never knew what the gentleman’s last name was, or whether he had any.  It was but a few minutes’ walk to the grove where the speaking was to be.  And as they made their way thither Mr. Lincoln passed them in a Conestoga wagon drawn by six milk-white horses.  Jim informed Stephen that the Little Giant had had a six-horse coach.  The grove was black with people.  Hovering about the hem of the crowd were the sunburned young men in their Sunday best, still clinging fast to the hands of the young women.  Bands blared “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.”  Fakirs planted their stands in the way, selling pain-killers and ague cures, watermelons and lemonade, Jugglers juggled, and beggars begged.  Jim said that there were sixteen thousand people in that grove.  And he told the truth.

Stephen now trembled for his champion.  He tried to think of himself as fifty years old, with the courage to address sixteen thousand people on such a day, and quailed.  What a man of affairs it must take to do that!  Sixteen thousand people, into each of whose breasts God had put different emotions and convictions.  He had never even imagined such a crowd as this assembles merely to listen to a political debate.  But then he remembered, as they dodged from in front of the horses, what it was not merely a political debate:  The pulse of nation was here, a great nation stricken with approaching fever.  It was not now a case of excise, but of existence.

This son of toil who had driven his family thirty miles across the prairie, blanketed his tired horses and slept on the ground the night before, who was willing to stand all through the afternoon and listen with pathetic eagerness to this debate, must be moved by a patriotism divine.  In the breast of that farmer, in the breast of his tired wife who held her child by the hand, had been instilled from birth that sublime fervor which is part of their life who inherit the Declaration of Independence.  Instinctively these men who had fought and won the West had scented the danger.  With the spirit of their ancestors who had left their farms to die on the bridge at Concord, or follow Ethan Allen into Ticonderoga, these had come to Freeport.  What were three days of bodily discomfort!  What even the loss of part of a cherished crop, if the nation’s existence were at stake and their votes might save it!

In the midst of that heaving human sea rose the bulwarks of a wooden stand.  But how to reach it?  Jim was evidently a personage.  The rough farmers commonly squeezed a way for him.  And when they did not, he made it with his big body.  As they drew near their haven, a great surging as of a tidal wave swept them off their feet.  There was a deafening shout, and the stand rocked on its foundations.  Before Stephen could collect his wits, a fierce battle was raging about him.  Abolitionist and Democrat, Free Soiler and Squatter Sov, defaced one another in a rush for the platform.  The committeemen and reporters on top of it rose to its defence.  Well for Stephen that his companion was along.  Jim was recognized and hauled bodily into the fort, and Stephen after him.  The populace were driven off, and when the excitement died down again, he found himself in the row behind the reporters.  Young Mr. Hill paused while sharpening his pencil to wave him a friendly greeting.