firesides of New England.  Through his speeches he seemed to be almost bodily present wherever the family, gathered in the evening around the blazing hearth, discussed the questions of the day.  It was not the great Mr. Webster, “the godlike Daniel,” who had a seat by the fire.  It was a person who talked to them, and argued with them, as though he was “one of the folks,”—­a neighbor dropping in to make an evening call; there was not the slightest trace of assumption in his manner; but suddenly, after the discussion had become a little tiresome, certain fiery words would leap from his lips and make the whole household spring to their feet, ready to sacrifice life and property for “the Constitution and the Union.”  That Webster was thus a kind of invisible presence in thousands of homes where his face was never seen, shows that his rhetoric had caught an element of power from his early recollections of the independent, hard-headed farmers whom he met when a boy in his father’s house.  The bodies of these men had become tough and strong in their constant struggle to force scanty harvests from an unfruitful soil, which only persistent toil could compel to yield any thing; and their brains, though forcible and clear, were still not stored with the important facts and principles which it was his delight to state and expound.  In truth, he ran a race with the demagogues of his time in an attempt to capture such men as these, thinking them the very backbone of the country.  Whether he succeeded or failed, it would be vain to hunt through his works to find a single epithet in which he mentioned them with contempt.  He was as incapable of insulting one member of this landed democracy,—­sterile as most of their acres were,—­as of insulting the memory of his father, who belonged to this class.

The late Mr. Peter Harvey used to tell with much zest a story illustrating the hold which these early associations retained on Webster’s mind throughout his life.  Some months after his removal from Portsmouth to Boston, a servant knocked at his chamber door late in an April afternoon in the year 1817, with the announcement that three men were in the drawing-room who insisted on seeing him.  Webster was overwhelmed with fatigue, the result of his Congressional labors and his attendance on courts of law; and he had determined, after a night’s sleep, to steal a vacation in order to recruit his energies by a fortnight’s fishing and hunting.  He suspected that the persons below were expectant clients; and he resolved, in descending the stairs, not to accept their offer.  He found in the parlor three plain, country-bred, honest-looking men, who were believers in the innocence of Levi and Laban Kenniston, accused of robbing a certain Major Goodridge on the highway, and whose trial would take place at Ipswich the next day.  They could find, they said, no member of the Essex bar who would undertake the defence of the Kennistons, and they had come to Boston