Lincoln was fully conscious of his popularity, and it seemed to him in 1834 that he could safely venture to try again for the legislature. Accordingly he announced himself as a candidate, spending much of the summer of 1834 in electioneering. It was a repetition of what he had done in 1832, though on the larger scale made possible by wider acquaintance. In company with the other candidates, he rode up and down the county, making speeches in the public squares, in shady groves, now and then in a log school-house. In his speeches he soon distinguished himself by the amazing candor with which he dealt with all questions, and by his curious blending of audacity and humility. Wherever he saw a crowd of men he joined them, and he never failed to adapt himself to their point of view in asking for votes. If the degree of physical strength was their test for a candidate, he was ready to lift a weight or wrestle with the country-side champion; if the amount of grain a man could cradle would recommend him, he seized the cradle and showed the swath he could cut. The campaign was well conducted, for in August he was elected one of the four assemblymen from Sangamon. The vote at this election stood: Dawson, 1390; Lincoln, 1376; Carpenter, 1170; Stuart, 1164.[3] [Illustration: MAJOR JOHN T. STUART, THE MAN WHO INDUCED LINCOLN TO STUDY LAW. Born in Kentucky in 1807. At twenty-one, on being admitted to the bar, he removed to Springfield, Illinois, and was soon prominent in his profession. He was a member of the legislature from 1832 to 1836. In 1838 he defeated Stephen A. Douglas for Congress, and served two terms--as a Whig. In 1863 and 1864 he served a third term--as a Democrat. He served also in the State Senate, and was a major in the Black Hawk War. He died in 1885.] HE FINALLY DECIDES ON A LEGAL CAREER. The best thing which Lincoln did in the canvass of 1834 was not winning votes; it was coming to a determination to read law, not for pleasure but as a business. In his autobiographical notes he says: "During the canvass, in a private conversation Major John T. Stuart (one of his fellow-candidates) encouraged Abraham to study law. After the election he borrowed books of Stuart, took them home with him, and went at it in good earnest. He never studied with anybody." He seems to have thrown himself into the work with an almost impatient ardor. As he tramped back and forth from Springfield, twenty miles away, to get his law-books, he read sometimes forty pages or more on the way. Often he was seen wandering at random across the fields, repeating aloud the points in his last reading. The subject seemed never to be out of his mind. It was the great absorbing interest of his life. The rule he gave twenty years later to a young man who wanted to know how to become a lawyer, seems to have been the one he practised.[4]