a house and was making what seemed to him plenty of money, he was
undoubtedly a trial to Mrs. Lincoln's sense of propriety. He could not
rise with his wife, socially. He was still what he had become so long
before, the favorite of all the men--good old Abe Lincoln that you could
tie to though it rained cats and dogs. But as to the ladies! Fashionable
people calling on Mrs. Lincoln, had been received by her husband in his
shirt-sleeves, and he totally unabashed, as oblivious of discrepancy
as if he were a nobleman and not a nobody.(8) The dreadful tradition
persists that he had been known at table to put his own knife into the
butter.

How safe to assume that many things were said commiserating poor Mrs.
Lincoln who had a bear for a husband. And some people noticed that
Lincoln did not come home at week-ends during term-time as often as he
might. Perhaps it meant something; perhaps it did not. But there could
be no doubt that the jovial itinerant life of the circuit was the life
for him--at least in the early 'fifties. That it was, and also that
he was becoming known as a lawyer, is evinced by his refusal of a
flattering invitation to enter a prosperous firm in Chicago.

Out of all this came a deepening of his power to reach and impress
men through words. The tournament of the story-tellers was a lawyers'
tournament. The central figure was reading, studying, thinking, as never
in his life before. Though his fables remained as broad as ever, the
merely boisterous character ceased to predominate. The ethical bent of
his mind came to the surface. His friends were agreed that what they
remembered chiefly of his stories was not the broad part of them, but
the moral that was in them.(9) And they had no squeamishness as critics
of the art of fable-making.