“I have lived long in the world, and have been happy in my children.  If Daniel and Ezekiel will promise to take care of me in my old age, I will consent to the sale of all our property at once, and they may enjoy the benefit of that which remains after our debts are paid.”

Upon hearing this, all the family, we are told, were dissolved in tears, and the old man gave his assent.  This seems hard,—­two stout and vigorous young men willing to risk their aged parents’ home and dignity for such a purpose, or for any purpose!  In the early days, however, there was a singular unity of feeling and interest in a good New England family, and there were opportunities for professional men which rendered the success of two such lads as these nearly certain, if they lived to establish themselves.  Nevertheless, it was too much to ask, and more than Daniel Webster would have asked if he had been properly alive to the rights of others.  Ezekiel shouldered his bundle, trudged off to school, where he lived and studied at the cost of one dollar a week, worked his way to the position of the second lawyer in New Hampshire, and would early have gone to Congress but for his stanch, inflexible Federalism.

Daniel Webster, schoolmaster and law-student, was assuredly one of the most interesting of characters.  Pinched by poverty, as he tells us, till his very bones ached, eking out his income by a kind of labor that he always loathed (copying deeds), his shoes letting in, not water merely, but “pebbles and stones,”—­father, brother, and himself sometimes all moneyless together, all dunned at the same time, and writing to one another for aid,—­he was nevertheless as jovial a young fellow as any in New England.  How merry and affectionate his letters to his young friends!  He writes to one, soon after leaving college: 

“You will naturally inquire how I prosper in the article of cash; finely, finely!  I came here in January with a horse, watch, etc., and a few rascally counters in my pocket.  Was soon obliged to sell my horse, and live on the proceeds.  Still straitened for cash, I sold my watch, and made a shift to get home, where my friends supplied me with another horse and another watch.  My horse is sold again, and my watch goes, I expect, this week; thus you see how I lay up cash.”

How like him!  To another college friend, James Hervey Bingham, whom he calls, by turns, “brother Jemmy,” “Jemmy Hervey,” and “Bingham,” he discourses thus: 

“Perhaps you thought, as I did, that a dozen dollars would slide out of the pocket in a Commencement jaunt much easier than they would slide in again after you got home.  That was the exact reason why I was not there....  I flatter myself that none of my friends ever thought me greatly absorbed in the sin of avarice, yet I assure you, Jem, that in these days of poverty I look upon a round dollar with a great deal of complacency.  These rascal dollars are