as simple as the attire
of the plainest of them. The court-house, in good old Colonial style,
with square pillars and belfry, was finished with wooden desks and
benches. The State furnished her law-makers no superfluities--three
dollars a day, a cork inkstand, a certain number of quills, and a
limited amount of stationery was all an Illinois legislator in 1834
got from his position. Scarcely more could be expected from a State
whose revenues from December 1, 1834, to December 1, 1836, were only
about one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, with expenditures
during the same period amounting to less than one hundred and
sixty-five thousand dollars.

[Illustration: JOSEPH DUNCAN, GOVERNOR OF ILLINOIS DURING LINCOLN'S
FIRST TERM IN THE LEGISLATURE.

Joseph Duncan, Governor of Illinois from 1834 to 1838, was born in
Kentucky in 1794. The son of an officer of the regular army, he,
at nineteen, became a soldier in the war of 1812, and did gallant
service. He removed to Illinois in 1818, and soon became prominent
in the State, serving as a major-general of militia, a State Senator,
and, from 1826 to 1834, as a member of Congress, resigning from
Congress to take the office of Governor. He was at first a Democrat,
but afterwards became a Whig. He was a man of the highest character
and public spirit. He died in 1844.]

Lincoln thought little of these things, no doubt. To him the absorbing
interest was the men he met. To get acquainted with them, measure
them, compare himself with them, and discover wherein they were his
superiors and what he could do to make good his deficiency--this
was his chief occupation. The men he met were good subjects for such
study. Among them were Wm. L.D. Ewing, Jesse K. Dubois, Stephen T.
Logan, Theodore Ford, and Governor Duncan--men destined to play large
parts in the history of the State. One whom he met that winter in
Vandalia was destined to play a great part in the history of the
nation--the Democratic candidate for the office of State attorney for
the first judicial district of Illinois; a man four years younger than
Lincoln--he was only twenty-one at the time; a new-comer, too, in the
State, having arrived about a year before, under no very promising
auspices either, for he had only thirty-seven cents in his pockets,
and no position in view; but a man of metal, it was easy to see, for
already he had risen so high in the district where he had settled,
that he dared contest the office