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.”