Of course, in the ten days left him after his return from the field, a canvass of the county, which was then--before its division--several thousand square miles in extent, was out of the question. He made a few speeches in the neighborhood of New Salem, and at least one in Springfield. He was wholly unknown there except by his few comrades in arms. We find him mentioned in the county paper only once during the summer, in an editorial note adding the name of Captain Lincoln to those candidates for the Legislature who were periling their lives on the frontier and had left their reputations in charge of their generous fellow-citizens at home. On the occasion of his speaking at Springfield, most of the candidates had come together to address a 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."