ompared with the life of a
Southern or Western town, and that is the life of students in a
boarding-school or a small college. In such communities there is little
division into classes, as of rich and poor, educated and illiterate,
well and obscurely born. On the steps of the court-house, in the
post-office while the daily mail is sorted, in the corner drug store on
Sundays, in lawyers' offices, on the curbstone,--wherever a group of men
is assembled,--there is the freest talk on every possible subject; and
the lives of men are open to their fellows as they cannot be in cities
by reason of the mass or in country districts by reason of the solitude
and the shyness which solitude breeds. Against Douglas there was the
presumption, which every New England man who goes southward or westward
has to live down, that he would in some measure hold himself aloof from
his fellows. But the prejudice was quickly dispelled. No man entered
more readily into close personal relations with whomsoever he
encountered. In all our accounts of him he is represented as surrounded
with intimates. Not without the power of impressing men with his dignity
and seriousness of purpose, we nevertheless hear of him sitting on the
knee of an eminent judge during a recess of the court; dancing from end
to end of a dinner-table with the volatile Shields--the same who won
laurels in the Mexican War, a seat in the United States Senate, and the
closest approach anybody ever won to victory in battle over Stonewall
Jackson; and engaging, despite his height of five feet and his weight of
a hundred pounds, in personal encounters with Stuart, Lincoln's athletic
law partner, and a corpulent attorney named Francis.

On equal terms he mingled in good-humored rivalry with a group of
uncommonly resourceful men, and he passed them all in the race for
advancement. There is some reason to believe that Lincoln, strange as it
seems, was his successful rival in a love affair, but otherwise Douglas
left Lincoln far behind. Buoyant, good-natured, never easily abashed,
his maturity and _savoir faire_ were accentuated by the smallness of his
stature. His blue eyes and his dark, abundant hair heightened his
physical charm of boyishness; his virile movements, his face,
heavy-browed, round, and strong, and his well-formed, uncommonly large
head gave him an aspect of intellectual power. He had a truly Napoleonic
trick of attaching men to his fortunes. He was a born leader, beyond
qu