He persuaded Ann to study with him again. All that long autumn, while the walnuts turned to gold, the maples flamed across the world, and the oaks poured their cascades of red wine over the bluffs, they were together. Often the two were seen under a giant sycamore, on a hill below the town and overlooking the river, Ann puzzling over conjugations, Lincoln sprawled at her feet reading Blackstone’s Commentaries. It was such an extraordinary thing in that unlettered region that it was remarked ever after by those who saw it. It was an affair of public interest, and now of publicly expressed satisfaction at the happier turn of events. The world not only loves a lover, but it loves wedding bells at the end of the story. The first frost touched the forests with a magic wand, then Indian summer lay its bloomy haze over the landscape like the diaphanous veil that parts a waiting soul from Paradise. With the gales and snows of December Lincoln rode away for his winter of lawmaking at Vandalia. Now, indeed, letters came for Ann across the white silence that lay in the valley of the Sangamon. Dated from the state capital they were, written with the quill pens and out of the cork inkstands the commonwealth provided. Not one of these letters is in existence to-day. They could not have been love-letters in the conventional sense, but eloquent of that large comradeship love holds for men and women of rare hearts and minds. For the first time he had come into contact with the men who were shaping the destinies of his state, measuring his capacities with theirs, and finding that he did not differ from them much in kind or degree. His ambition took definite shape. He saw a future of distinction and service such as he would be proud to ask Ann to share. What pictures of men and the times he must have drawn for her! In those pioneer days only a few of the public men were backwoods lawyers like himself. Some, indeed, and many of the best, expressed the native genius and crude force that were transforming the wilderness. But there were old-world aristocrats, to whom the English language even was exotic, from Kaskaskia and the French mission towns, more than a century old, on the Mississippi. And there were Southern planters of wealth, whose fiery code always held for Lincoln an element of the absurd. Eastern men too, were there, with traditions of generations of learning and public service, and some “Yankees” with an over-developed shrewdness that the others agreed in detesting. Chicago was only an upstart village; northern Illinois just opened up to emigration from the East; southern Illinois was of the South, in population and sentiment, with the added grace of French manners. The capital was a tiny city, but it had high-bred society into which Ann would fit so well. There would be humorous anecdotes in those letters, too, to restore the gaiety of her heart, for, much as he loved men, their foibles and failings furnished him infinite amusement.