be explicit. He had seen the blow and distinguished the weapon by the
light of the moon.

Lincoln was accustomed from early life to relieve his brain when
toiling or distressed, by the turning to a vein utterly opposed to
those moods. His chief diversion from Blackstone and the statutes
was his favorite author, Shakespeare. Hackett, the _Falstaff_
delighted in by our grandfathers, pronounced the President a better
student of that dramatist than he expected to meet.

As the ancients drew fates, as it is called, from Virgil, and the
medievals from the Bible, so the lawyer drew hints from his author.
The process is to open at a page and read as a forecast the first line
meeting the eye. The play-book opened at "Midsummer Night's Dream."
To refresh himself after his speeches in rehearsal, Lincoln had been
enjoying the humor of the amateur-actor clowns. So the line "leaping
into sight" was on parallel lines with his thought.

"Does the moon shine that night?" So the text. Whereupon, _Nick
Bottom_, a weaver, cries out: "A calendar! look in the almanack!
find out moonshine!"

The pleader had his cue!

It was not necessary to postpone the trial on the ground that the
debate upon the new charge prevented a fair jury in the district.
Besides, the widow would grow mad in the long suspense, even if the
prisoner bore it manfully, though sorrowing for her and his misspent
life. The trial was indeed the event of the year at the courthouse.
The witnesses for the prosecution repeated about Armstrong much the