ircuit. Twice a year the circuit judge traveled from one county-seat to
another, the lawyers who had business before the court following also.
As newspapers were neither plentiful nor widely read, members of the
legislature were often called upon, while on these journeys, to explain
the laws they had helped to make during the previous winter, and
thus became the political teachers of the people. They had to be well
informed and watchful. When, like Mr. Lincoln, they were witty, and had
a fund of interesting stories besides, they were sure of a welcome and
a hearing in the courtroom, or in the social gatherings that roused the
various little towns during "court-week" into a liveliness quite put of
the common. The tavern would be crowded to its utmost--the judge having
the best room, and the lawyers being put in what was left, late comers
being lucky to find even a sleeping-place on the floor. When not
occupied in court, or preparing cases for the morrow, they would sit
in the public room, or carry their chairs out on the sidewalk in front,
exchanging stories and anecdotes, or pieces of political wisdom, while
men from the town and surrounding farms, dropping in on one pretext or
another, found excuse to linger and join in the talk. At meal-times the
judge presided at the head of the long hotel table, on which the food
was abundant if not always wholesome, and around which lawyers, jurors,
witnesses, prisoners out on bail, and the men who drove the teams,
gathered in friendly equality. Stories of what Mr. Lincoln did and said
on the eighth judicial circuit are still quoted almost with the force
of law; for in this close companionship men came to know each other
thoroughly, and were judged at their true value professionally, as well
as for their power to entertain.

It was only in worldly wealth that Lincoln was poor. He could hold his
own with the best on the eighth judicial circuit, or anywhere else
in the State. He made friends wherever he went. In politics, in
daily conversation, in his work as a lawyer, his life was gradually
broadening. Slowly but surely, too, his gifts as an attractive public
speaker were becoming known. In 1837 he wrote and delivered an able
address before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield. In December, 1839,
Stephen A. Douglas, the most brilliant of the young Democrats then in
Springfield, challenged the young Whigs of the town to a tournament of
political speech-making, in which Lincoln bore a