Fortunately, he was too late; the place had been promised to another and he was spared a political burial in a Washington bureau. He was deeply disappointed for a time, and was tempted to console himself with a lesser office out in the territory of Oregon, but Mrs. Lincoln's objections overruled him. He returned to his dingy little law office in Springfield with reluctance, gave up politics, and went to work at his profession. "I have always been a fatalist," he said afterward. "What is to be, will be, or rather, I have found all my life, as Hamlet

says,

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough hew them how we will.'"

LIFE ON THE CIRCUIT

Failing as an office seeker, Lincoln returned to his dingy little law office in Springfield in 1849. — Declined a lucrative city practice in Chicago. His indifference to money making. Censured for his small charges. His yearly income. — His largest fee. Discouraging unnecessary lawsuits and rejecting cases that were wrong. Championing the cause of the poor without pay. A pen picture of the man as he rode the country circuit. Some of his noted cases in the higher courts. His bitter rebuff at the hands of Edwin M. Stanton, in an important case at Cincinnati in 1857.

FORTUNE never served Lincoln better than when, at the end of his two years in Congress, she led his steps up the old stairway to the bare and dingy law office of Lincoln and Herndon in the back room of a two-story brick building on the Square in Springfield.

It was not a spacious office, nor even a clean one, for in a neglected corner of it, where packages of government seeds were tossed, the seeds found enough earth in which to take root and sprout. Here, however, Lincoln was his own master, free to think his own thoughts and to speak them. He would have been far more cramped in the lofty and extensive quarters of the Commissioner of the General

Land Office at Washington than within these narrow and dusty walls.

Amid admiring friends and familiar surroundings, he soon forgot his desires and disappointments as an office-seeker, for his ambition really did not lie in that direction. A flattering offer of a partnership with a prosperous Chicago lawyer did not tempt him in the least, and he declined it on the ground that, having a tendency to consumption, confinement in a city office might kill him.

In prompting him to this decision, fortune again favored him. A Chicago practice might not have proved fatal to his health, but the big clients and the big fees of a city well might have interfered with his mental and moral growth. As it was, he lived and died without a trace of avarice. No lawyer of his ability ever cared less for money. To him wealth was, as he once said, "simply a superfluity of things we don't need."

No man in his position could have fewer needs. His tastes remained to the end as simple as they were in the beginning. While other members of the bar grew rich by accumulating land, he would not turn his hand over to make a dollar in speculation and was content to stay a poor man. Most of the able lawyers around him made more money in representing absent landlords and money lenders

than they earned at the bar. Not liking that line of work, however, he refused to trouble himself with it, even in his early days when clients were few. Once in declining such a chance, he wrote, recommending another man, "whom," as he said, 'the Lord made on purpose for just that kind of business."

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He was a poor money maker in his profession itself. Daniel Webster, who sent him a case, was amazed at the smallness of his bill, and his fellowlawyers generally looked upon his charges as scandalously low. This, indeed, seemed to be his only fault in their eyes. In one instance, where another attorney had collected two hundred and fifty dollars for their joint services in a case, he refused to accept his share until the fee had been reduced to what he considered a fair sum and the overcharge had been returned to the client. When David Davis, the presiding judge of the circuit, who himself became a millionaire landowner, heard of this, he indignantly exclaimed, “Lincoln, your picayune charges will impoverish the bar."

Lincoln's practice, at best, probably brought him an income of from two to three thousand dollars a year. The largest fee he ever charged was in an important tax case for the Illinois Central Railway Company. After he had won the suit, he pre

sented, in person, his bill for two thousand dollars, and an official of the corporation regarded it as so extortionate that he refused to pay it. It was a new experience for Lincoln to have any question raised as to the fairness of his charges. When he conferred with his friends at the bar, however, they agreed that his bill was ridiculously small. At their urgent suggestion he sued for five thousand dollars and the court compelled the company to pay it.

It was a common thing for Lincoln to discourage unnecessary lawsuits, and consequently he was continually sacrificing opportunities to make money. One man who asked him to bring suit for two dollars and a half against a debtor who had not a cent with which to pay, would not be put off in his passion for revenge. His counsel, therefore, gravely demanded ten dollars as a retainer. Half of this he gave to the poor defendant, who thereupon confessed judgment and paid the two dollars and a half. Thus the suit was ended to the entire satisfaction of the wrothy creditor.

Lincoln was equally ready to take up a just case without hope of pay as he was to refuse' an unjust one at the loss of a good fee. He dragged into court a pension agent who insisted on keeping for himself half of a four-hundred-dollar claim, which he had collected from the government for the aged widow