from the power and sincerity of the anti-slavery leaders.  Fillmore and his Postmaster-General, N.K.  Hall, were old family friends.  We children had chummed with their children.  Their kindly, honest faces were among the best known to us in the circle of our elders.  I had learned to respect no men more.  I was about to behold Webster, Fillmore’s chief secretary and counsellor.  On the one hand he was much denounced, on the other adored, in each case with fiery vehemence, and in my little world the contrasting passions were wildly ablaze.  In the mass that crowded Faneuil Hall we waited long, an interval partly filled by the eccentric and eloquent Father Taylor, the seamen’s preacher, whom the crowd espied in the gallery and summoned clamorously.  My mood was serious, and it jarred upon me when a classmate, building on current rumours, speculated irreverently as to the probable contents of the pitcher on Mr. Webster’s desk.  He came at last, tumultuously accompanied and received, and advanced to the front, his large frame, if I remember right, dressed in the blue coat with brass buttons and buff vest usual to him on public occasions, which hung loosely about the attenuated limbs and body.  The face had all the majesty I expected, the dome above, the deep eyes looking from the caverns, the strong nose and chin, but it was the front of a dying lion.  His colour was heavily sallow, and he walked with a slow, uncertain step.  His low, deep intonations conveyed a solemn suggestion of the sepulchre.  His speech was brief, a recognition of the honour shown him, an expression of his belief that the policy he had advocated and followed was necessary to the country’s preservation.  Then he passed out to Marshfield and the death-bed.  What he said was not much, but it made a strange impression of power, and here I am minded to tell an ancient story.  Sixty years ago, when I was ensconced in my smug youth, and could “sit and grin,” like young Dr. Holmes, at the queernesses of the last leaves of those days, I heard a totterer whose ground was the early decades of the last century, chirp as follows: 

“This Daniel Webster of yours!  Why, I can remember when he had a hard push to have his ability acknowledged.  We used to aver that he never said anything, and that it was only his big way that carried the crowd.  I have in mind an old-time report of one of his deliverances:  ’Mr. Chairman (applause), I did not graduate at this university (greater applause), at this college (tumultuous applause), I graduated at another college (wild cheering with hats thrown in the air), I graduated at a college of my native State (convulsions of enthusiasm, during which the police spread mattresses to catch those who leaped from the windows).’”