to engage the services of Mr. Webster.  Would he go down to Ipswich and defend the accused?  Mr. Webster stated that he could not and would not go.  He had made arrangements for an excursion to the sea-side; the state of his health absolutely demanded a short withdrawal from all business cares; and that no fee could tempt him to abandon his purpose.  “Well,” was the reply of one of the delegation, “it isn’t the fee that we think of at all, though we are willing to pay what you may charge; but it’s justice.  Here are two New Hampshire men who are believed in Exeter, and Newbury, and Newburyport, and Salem to be rascals; but we in Newmarket believe, in spite of all evidence against them, that they are the victims of some conspiracy.  We think you are the man to unravel it, though it seems a good deal tangled even to us.  Still we suppose that men whom we know to have been honest all their lives can’t have become such desperate rogues all of a sudden.”  “But I cannot take the case,” persisted Mr. Webster; “I am worn to death with over-work.  I have not had any real sleep for forty-eight hours.  Besides, I know nothing of the case.”  “It’s hard, I can see,” continued the leader of the delegation; “but you’re a New Hampshire man, and the neighbors thought that you would not allow two innocent New Hampshire men, however humble they may be in their circumstances, to suffer for lack of your skill in exposing the wiles of this scoundrel Goodridge.  The neighbors all desire you to take the case.”  That phrase “the neighbors” settled the question.  No resident of a city knows what the phrase means.  But Webster knew it in all the intense significance of its meaning.  His imagination flew back to the scattered homesteads of a New England village, where mutual sympathy and assistance are the necessities, as they are the commonplaces, of village life.  The phrase remotely meant to him the combination of neighbors to resist an assault of Indian savages, or to send volunteers to the war which wrought the independence of the nation.  It specially meant to him the help of neighbor to neighbor, in times of sickness, distress, sorrow, and calamity.  In his childhood and boyhood the Christian question, “Who is my neighbor?” was instantly solved the moment a matron in good health heard that the wife of Farmer A, or Farmer B, was stricken down by fever, and needed a friendly nurse to sit by her bedside all night, though she had herself been toiling hard all day.  Every thing philanthropists mean when they talk of brotherhood and sisterhood among men and women was condensed in that homely phrase, “the neighbors.”  “Oh!” said Webster, ruefully, “if the neighbors think I may be of service, of course I must go";—­and, with his three companions, he was soon seated in the stage for Ipswich, where he arrived at about midnight.  The court met the next morning; and his management of the case is still considered one of his masterpieces of legal acumen and eloquence.  His cross-examination