“Lincoln was very bashful when in the presence of ladies. I remember once we were invited to take tea at a friend’s house, and while in the parlor I was called to the front gate to see someone.
“When I returned, Lincoln, who had undertaken to entertain the ladies, was twisting and squirming in his chair, and as bashful as a schoolboy.”
SAW HUMOR IN EVERYTHING.
There was much that was irritating and uncomfortable in the circuit-riding of the Illinois court, but there was more which was amusing to a temperament like Lincoln’s. The freedom, the long days in the open air, the unexpected if trivial adventures, the meeting with wayfarers and settlers—all was an entertainment to him. He found humor and human interest on the route where his companions saw nothing but commonplaces.
“He saw the ludicrous in an assemblage of fowls,” says H. C. Whitney, one of his fellow-itinerants, “in a man spading his garden, in a clothes-line full of clothes, in a group of boys, in a lot of pigs rooting at a mill door, in a mother duck teaching her brood to swim—in everything and anything.”