le we both had in life. He was
then just as good at telling an anecdote as now. He could beat
any of the boys wrestling or running a foot-race, in pitching quoits
or tossing a copper, and the dignity and impartiality with which
he presided at a horse-race or a fist-fight, excited the admiration
and won the praise of everybody. I sympathized with him because
he was struggling with difficulties, and so was I."

To which Lincoln replied:

"The Judge is woefully at fault about his friend Lincoln being a
grocery-keeper. I don't know as it would be a sin if I had been;
but he is mistaken. Lincoln never kept a grocery anywhere in
the world. It is true that Lincoln did work the latter part of
one Winter in a little still house up at the head of a hollow."

The serious phases of the debates will now be considered. The
opening speech was by Mr. Douglas. That he possessed rare power
as a debater, all who heard him can bear witness. Mr. Blaine in
his history says:

"His mind was fertile in resources. He was master of logic. In
that peculiar style of debate which in its intensity resembles a
physical combat, he had no equal. He spoke with extraordinary
readiness. He used good English, terse, pointed, vigorous. He
disregarded the adornments of rhetoric. He never cited historic
precedents except from the domain of American politics. Inside
that field, his knowledge was comprehensive, minute, critical. He
could lead a crowd almost irresistibly to his own conclusions."

Douglas was, in very truth, imbued with little of mere sentiment.
He gave little time to discussions belonging solely to the realm
of the speculative or the abstract. He was in no sense a dreamer.
What Coleridge has defined wisdom--"common sense, in an uncommon
degree"--was his. In phrase the simplest and most telling, he
struck at once at the very core of the controversy. Possibly no
man was ever less inclined "to darken counsel with words without
knowledge." Positive, and aggressive to the last degree, he never
sought "by indirections to find directions out." In statesmanship--
in all that pertained to human affairs--he was intensely practical.
With him, in the words of Macaulay, "one acre in Middlesex is worth
a principality in Utopia."

It is a pleasure to recall--after the lapse of half a century--the
two men as they shook hands upon the speaker's stand, just before the
opening of the debates that were to mark an epoch in American
hist