He loved Burns for his
philosophy that "a man's a man for a' that." So with these and others he
found his high fellowships, even while he "swapped" stories (enriched of
his reading) with his neighbors at the store or his fellow lawyers at the
primitive taverns.
But there were less personal associations. He made the fundamental laws of
a wilderness State an acquisition of his instincts. There is preserved in
a law library in New York the much-worn copy of the statutes of Indiana
enacted in the first years of the existence of that State. It is stated
that he learned these statutes by copying extracts from them--and from the
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and
the Ordinance of the Northwest, included in the same volume--on a shingle
when paper was scarce, using ink made of the juice of brier-root and a pen
made from the quill of a turkey-buzzard, and shaving the shingle clean for
another extract when one was learned, till his primitive palimpsest was
worn out.
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