meeting there to give their electors some idea of their quality. These
were severe ordeals for the rash aspirants for popular favor. Besides
those citizens who came to listen and judge, there were many whose
only object was the free whisky provided for the occasion, and who,
after potations pottle-deep, became not only highly unparliamentary
but even dangerous to life and limb. This wild chivalry of Lick Creek
was, however, less redoubtable to Lincoln than it might be to an urban
statesman unacquainted with the frolic brutality of Clary's Grove.
Their gambols never caused him to lose his self-possession. It is
related that once, while he was speaking, he saw a ruffian attack a
friend of his in the crowd, and the rencontre not resulting according
to the orator's sympathies, he descended from the stand, seized the
objectionable fighting man by the neck, "threw him some ten feet,"
then calmly mounted to his place and finished his speech, the course
of his logic undisturbed by this athletic parenthesis. Judge Logan saw
Lincoln for the first time on the day when he came up to Springfield
on his canvass this summer. He thus speaks of his future partner: "He
was a very tall, gawky, and rough-looking fellow then; his pantaloons
didn't meet his shoes by six inches. But after he began speaking I
became very much interested in him. He made a very sensible speech.
His manner was very much the same as in after life; that is, the same
peculiar characteristics were apparent then, though of course in after
years he evinced more knowledge and experience. But he had then the
same novelty and the same peculiarity in presenting his ideas. He had
the same individuality that he kept through all his life."

There were two or three men at the meeting whose good opinion was
worth more than all the votes of Lick Creek to one beginning life:
Stephen T. Logan, a young lawyer who had recently come from Kentucky
with the best equipment for a _nisi prius_ practitioner ever