irst acquaintance with some writers of unsettling
tendency, Tom Paine, Voltaire, and Volney, who was then recognised as
one of the dangerous authors. Cock-fights, strange feats of strength,
or of usefulness with axe or hammer or scythe, and a passion for
mimicry continue. In 1834 he became a candidate again. "Can't the
party raise any better material than that?" asked a bystander before a
speech of his; after it, he exclaimed that the speaker knew more than
all the other candidates put together. This time he was elected, being
then twenty-five, and thereafter he was returned for three further
terms of two years. Shortly before his second election in 1836 the
State capital was removed to Springfield, in his own county. There in
1837 Lincoln fixed his home. He had long been reading law in his
curious, spasmodically concentrated way, and he had practised a little
as a "pettifogger," that is, an unlicensed practitioner in the inferior
courts. He had now obtained his license and was very shortly taken
into partnership by an old friend in Springfield.

2. _In the Illinois Legislature_.

Here his youth may be said to end. Springfield was a different place
from New Salem. There were carriages in it, and ladles who studied
poetry and the fashions. There were families from Virginia and
Kentucky who were conscious of ancestry, while graver, possibly more
pushing, people from the North-eastern States, soon to outnumber them,
were a little inclined to ridicule what they called their "illusory
ascendency." There was a brisk competition of churches, and mutual
improvement societies such as the "Young Men's Lyceum" had a rival
claim to attention with races and cock-fights.

And it was an altered Abraham Lincoln that came to inhabit Springfield.
Arriving a day or two before his first law partnership was settled he
came into the shop of a thriving young tradesman, Mr. Joshua Speed, to
ask about the price of the cheapest bedding and other necessary
articles. The sum for which Lincoln, who had not one cent, would have
had to ask, and would have been readily allowed, credit, was only
seventeen dollars. But this huge prospect of debt so visibly depressed
him that Speed instantly proposed an arrangement which involved no
money debt. He took him upstairs and installed him--Western domestic
arrangements were and are still simple--as the joint occupant of his
own large bed. "Well, Speed, I'm moved," was the terse acknowledgme