seriously with him, and persuaded him, against his will, to continue his preparation, for the bar.  At every turning-point of his life, whenever he came to a parting of the ways, one of which must be chosen and the other forsaken, he required an impulse from without to push him into the path he was to go.  Except once!  Once in his long public life, he seemed to venture out alone on an unfamiliar road, and lost himself.  Usually, when great powers are conferred on a man, there is also given him a strong propensity to exercise them, sufficient to carry him through all difficulties to the suitable sphere.  Here, on the contrary, there was a Great Eastern with only a Cunarder’s engine, and it required a tug to get the great ship round to her course.

Admitted to the bar in his twenty-third year, he dutifully went home to his father, and opened an office in a New Hampshire village near by, resolved never again to leave the generous old man while he lived.  Before leaving Boston, he wrote to his friend Bingham, “If I am not earning my bread and cheese in exactly nine days after my admission, I shall certainly be a bankrupt";—­and so, indeed, it proved.  With great difficulty, he “hired” eighty-five dollars as a capital to begin business with, and this great sum was immediately lost in its transit by stage.  To any other young man in his situation, such a calamity would have been, for the moment, crushing; but this young man, indifferent to meum as to tuum, informs his brother that he can in no conceivable way replace the money, cannot therefore pay for the books he had bought, believes he is earning his daily bread, and as to the loss, he has “no uneasy sensations on that account.”  He concludes his letter with an old song, beginning,

     “Fol de dol, dol de dol, di dol,
     I’ll never make money my idol.”

In the New Hampshire of 1805 there was no such thing possible as leaping at once into a lucrative practice, nor even of slowly acquiring it.  A country lawyer who gained a thousand dollars a year was among the most successful, and the leader of the bar in New Hampshire could not earn two thousand.  The chief employment of Daniel Webster, during the first year or two of his practice, was collecting debts due in New Hampshire to merchants in Boston.  His first tin sign has been preserved to the present day, to attest by its minuteness and brevity the humble expectations of its proprietor.  “D.  Webster, Attorney,” is the inscription it bears.  The old Court-House still stands in which he conducted his first suit, before his own father as presiding judge.  Old men in that part of New Hampshire were living until within these few years, who remembered well seeing this tall, gaunt, and large-eyed young lawyer rise slowly, as though scarcely able to get upon his feet, and giving to every one the impression that he would soon be obliged to sit down from mere physical weakness, and saying to his father, for the first and last time,