“There ain’t any doubt but there was a good many years after Mr. Lincoln got started and everybody in the state held him high, when he was a disappointed man and when he brooded a good deal over the way life was goin’. Trouble was he hadn’t got a grip yet on anything that satisfied him. He hadn’t made a go of politics, had quit it. Of course he had plenty of law practice, but, Lord a mighty, you take a town like this was along in the ’40’s and ’50’s, when Mr. Lincoln was practicin’ here, and get right down to what was really happenin’, and it was enuff to make a broodin’ man like him sick, and want to quit. He had to handle it all, a lawyer does, men fightin’ over a dollar, gettin’ rich on cheatin’, stingy with their wives, breakin’ up families, quarrelin’ over wills, neglectin’ the old folks and yet standin’ high in the church, regular at prayer meetin’, and teachin’ in Sunday School. There was a lot of steady meanness like that all around, and it made him feel bad. “And then there was dreadful things happened every now and then, men takin’ up with girls when they had good wives of their own. There’s more than one poor child lyin’ over there in the graveyard because some onery old scoundrel got the better of her, and there’s more than one good man been put to shame in this town because some woman who was no better than she ought to be run him down. Lord, it makes you sick, and then every now and then right out of a clear sky there’d be a murder somewhere in the country. Nobody would talk of anything else for days. People who hardly ever opened their mouths would find their tongues and tell the durnedest things. “It was so all the time Mr. Lincoln was practicin’ out here. And it made him pretty miserable sometimes, I reckon, to see so much meanness around. I never knew a man who liked people better’n Mr. Lincoln did--seemed as if he felt the world ought to be happy, and that it could be if people would only do the right thing. You’ve heard people tellin’ how he’d refuse a case often if he didn’t think it ought to be brought. Well, sir, that’s true. I’ve heard him argue time and again with the boys about the duty of lawyers to discourage lawsuits. ‘It’s our business to be peacemakers,’ he used to tell ’em, ‘not to stir up quarrels for the sake of makin’ a little money.’ I remember somebody tellin’ how they heard him lecturin’ a man who’d brought him a case, and pointed out that by some sort of a legal trick, he could get $600. Made Lincoln mad all through. ‘I won’t take your case,’ he said, ‘but I’ll give you some free advice. You’re a husky young man. Go to work and _earn_ your $600.’