Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/87

 been longing for; I wished to finish my law studies, and, deeper down than any ambition for the bar, I was nourishing a desire to write, or if it does not seem too pretentious, an ambition in literature; and neither of these aims could well be accomplished, say from midnight on, after working all day on a morning newspaper.

It was a pleasant change. Springfield was lovely in the spring, which came to it earlier than it visited Chicago, and it was a relief to escape the horrid atmosphere of a great brutal city which as a reporter it had seemed my fate to behold for the most part at night. There was a sense of spaciousness in the green avenues of the quiet town, and there was pleasant society, and better perhaps than all there were two big libraries in the Capitol, the law library of the Supreme Court and the state library; and after the noisy legislature had adjourned a peace fell on the great, cool stone pile that was almost academic.

Twice or thrice a day Governor Altgeld was to be seen passing through its vast corridors, his head bent thoughtfully, rapt afar from the things about him in those dreams of social amelioration which had visited him so much earlier than they came to most of his contemporaries. He had read much, and during his residence there the executive mansion had the atmosphere of intellectual culture. When-*ever I went over there, which I did now and then with his secretary for luncheon or for an evening at cards, our talk was almost always of books.

We were all reading George Meredith in those