Bim's judgment of her old friends was ill founded. It was a slow time in which she lived. The foot of the horse, traveling and often mired in a rough muddy highway, was its swiftest courier. Letters carried by horses or slow steamboats were the only media of communication between people separated by wide distances. The learned wrote letters of astonishing length and literary finish--letters which were passed from hand to hand and read aloud in large and small assemblies. They presented the news and the comment it inspired. In these old and generous letters, which antedate the railroad and the telegraph, critics have discovered one of the most delicate and informing of the lost arts--the epistolary. But to the average hand, wearied by heavy tools, the lightsome goose quill, committing its owner to dubious spelling and clumsy penmanship, and exposing the interior of his intellect, was a dreaded thing. When old Black Hawk signed a treaty he was wont to say that he had "touched it with the goose quill." He made only a little mark whereupon a kind of sanctity was imparted to the document. Every man unaccustomed to its use stood in like awe of this implement. When he "took his pen in hand" he had entered upon an adventure so unusual that his letter always mentioned it as if, indeed, it were an item of news not to be overlooked. So it is easy to understand that many who had traveled far were as the dead, in a measure, to the friends they had left behind them and that those separated by only half a hundred miles had to be very enterprising to keep acquainted. In March Abe Lincoln had got his license to practise law. On his return from the North he had ridden to Springfield to begin his work as a lawyer in the office of John T. Stuart. His plan was to hire and furnish a room arid get his meals at the home of his friend, Mr. William Butler. He went to the store of Joshua Speed to buy a bed and some bedding. He found that they would cost seventeen dollars. "The question is whether you would trust a man owing a national debt and without an asset but good intentions and a license to practise law for so much money," said Honest Abe. "I don't know when I could pay you." Speed was also a young man of good intentions and a ready sympathy f or those who had little else. He had heard of the tall representative from Sangamon County. "I have a plan which will give you a bed for nothing if you would care to share my room above the store and sleep with me," he answered. "I'm much obliged but for you it's quite a contract." "You're rather long," Speed laughed.