he had fears for Ezekiel, but that Daniel would assuredly make his way in the world.  It is certain that the lad himself was totally unconscious of possessing extraordinary talents, and indulged no early dream of greatness.  He tells us himself, that he loved but two things in his youth,—­play and reading.  The rude schools which he trudged two or three miles in the winter every day to attend, taught him scarcely anything.  His father’s saw-mill, he used to say, was the real school of his youth.  When he had set the saw and turned on the water, there would be fifteen minutes of tranquillity before the log again required his attention, during which he sat and absorbed knowledge.

“We had so few books,” he records in the exquisite fragment of autobiography he has left us, “that to read them once or twice was nothing.  We thought they were all to be got by heart.”

How touching the story, so well known, of the mighty struggle and long self-sacrifice it cost this family to get the youth through college!  The whole expense did not average one hundred and fifty dollars a year; but it seemed to the boy so vast and unattainable a good, that, when his father announced his purpose to attempt it, he was completely overcome; his head was dizzy; his tongue was paralyzed; he could only press his father’s hands and shed tears.  Slender indeed was his preparation for Dartmouth.  From the day when he took his first Latin lesson to that on which he entered college was thirteen months.  He could translate Cicero’s orations with some ease, and make out with difficulty and labor the easiest sentences of the Greek Reader, and that was the whole of what was called his “preparation” for college.  In June, 1797, he did not know the Greek alphabet; in August of the same year he was admitted to the Freshman Class of Dartmouth on engaging to supply his deficiencies by extra study.

Neither at college nor at any time could Daniel Webster be properly called a student, and well he knew it.  Many a time he has laughed, in his jovial, rollicking manner, at the preposterous reputation for learning a man can get by bringing out a fragment of curious knowledge at the right moment at college.  He was an absorbent of knowledge, never a student.  The Latin of Cicero and Virgil was congenial and easy to him, and he learned more of it than the required portion.  But even in Latin, he tells us, he was excelled by some of his own class; and “his attainments were not such,” he adds, “as told for much in the recitation-room.”  Greek he never enjoyed:  his curiosity was never awakened on the edge of that boundless contiguity of interesting knowledge, and he only learned enough Greek to escape censure.  He said, forty years after, in an after-dinner speech: