Here he began the study of law in good earnest, though with no preceptor. He studied while he had bread, and then started out on a surveying tour to win the money that would buy more.
One who remembers his habits during this period says that he went, day after day, for weeks, and sat under an oak tree near New Salem and read, moving around to keep in the shade as the sun moved. He was so much absorbed that some people thought and said that he was crazy.
Not unfrequently he met and passed his best friends without noticing them. The truth was that he had found the pursuit of his life, and had become very much in earnest.
During Lincoln’s campaign he possessed and rode a horse, to procure which he had quite likely sold his compass and chain, for, as soon as the canvass had closed, he sold the horse and bought these instruments indispensable to him in the only pursuit by which he could make his living.
When the time for the assembling of the legislature had arrived Lincoln dropped his law books, shouldered his pack, and, on foot, trudged to Vandalia, then the capital of the State, about a hundred miles, to make his entrance into public life.
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“The Long Nine.”