s." Every moment of leisure he
gave to the study of Webster and Burke and Byron and Shakespeare and
Burns. He had begun to study the art of Irving and Walter Scott and of a
new writer of the name of Dickens. There were four men who slept with
him, in the room above Speed's store, and one of them has told how he
used to lie sprawled on the floor, with his pillow and candle, reading
long after the others had gone to sleep. Samson writes that he never knew
a man who understood the art of using minutes as he did. A detached
minute was to him a thing to be filled with value. Yet there were few
men so deeply in love with fun. He loved to laugh at a story-telling and
to match his humor with Thompson Campbell--a famous raconteur--and to
play with children. Fun was as necessary to him as sleep. He searched for
it in people and in books.

He came often to Samson's house to play with "Mr. Nimble" and to talk
with Joe. Some of his best thoughts came when he was talking with Joe and
some of his merriest moments when he was playing with "Mr. Nimble." He
confessed that it was the latter that reminded him that he had better be
looking for a wife.

But Lincoln was only one of many remarkable personalities in Springfield
who had discovered themselves and were seeking to be discovered. Sundry
individuals were lifting their heads above the crowd but not with the
modesty and self-distrust of Honest Abe. "Steve" Douglas, whom Samson had
referred to as "that little rooster of a man," put on the stilts of a
brave and ponderous vigor. His five-foot stature and his hundred pounds
of weight did not fit the part of Achilles. But he would have no other.
He blustered much with a spear too heavy for his hands. Lincoln used to
call him a kind of popgun.

This free-for-all joust of individualism--one of the first fruits of
Freedom in the West--gave to the life of the little village a rich flavor
of comedy. The great talents of Douglas had not been developed. His
character was as yet shifty and shapeless. Some of the leading citizens
openly distrusted him. He sought to command respect by assaulting men of
full size and was repeatedly and soundly thumped for his presumption. He
had endeavored publicly to chastise the sturdy Simeon Francis and had
been bent over a market cart and severely wigged by the editor. Lincoln
used to call these affairs "the mistakes of Douglas due wholly to the
difference between the size of his body and the size of his feelin'