convivial Senator Douglas, and the like. These formed the rapt ring
around Lincoln in his own chair in the snug corner of the congressional
chat-room. Here he perceived that his rusticity and shallow skimmings
placed him under the trained politicians. It was here, too, that his
stereotyped prologue to his digressions--"That reminds me"--became
popular, and even reached England, where a publisher so entitled
a joke-book. Lincoln displaced "Sam Slick," and opened the way to
Artemus Ward and Mark Twain. The longing for elevation was fanned by
the association with the notables--Buchanan, to be his predecessor
as President; Andrew Johnson, to be his vice and successor; Jefferson
Davis and Alex. H. Stephens, President and Vice-President of the
C. S. A.; Adams, Winthrop, Sumner, and the galaxy over whom his
solitary star was to shine dazzlingly.

A sound authority who knew him of old pronounced him "as good at
telling an anecdote as in the '30's." But the fluent chatterer reined
in and became a good listener. He imbibed all the political ruses, and
returned home with his quiver full of new and victorious arrows for
the Presidential campaign, for his bosom friends urged him to try to
gratify that ambition, preposterous when he first felt it attack him.
He had grown out of the sensitiveness that once made him beg the
critics not to put him out by laughing at his appearance. He formed
a boundless arsenal of images and similes; he learned the American
humorist's art not to parade the joke with a discounting smile. He
worked out Euclid to brace his fantasies, as the steel bar in a
cement fence-post makes it irresistibly firm. But he allowed his
vehement fervor to carry him into such flights as left the reporters
unable to accompany his sentences throughout.

He was recognized as the destined national mouthpiece. He was not of