“May it please your Honor.”  The sheriff of the county, who was also a Webster, used to say that he felt ashamed to see the family represented at the bar by so lean and feeble a young man.  The tradition is, that he acquitted himself so well on this occasion that the sheriff was satisfied, and clients came, with their little suits and smaller fees, in considerable numbers, to the office of D. Webster, Attorney, who thenceforth in the country round went by the name of “All-eyes.”  His father never heard him speak again.  He lived to see Daniel in successful practice, and Ezekiel a student of law, and died in 1806, prematurely old.  Daniel Webster practised three years in the country, and then, resigning his business to his brother, established himself at Portsmouth, the seaport of New Hampshire, then a place of much foreign commerce.  Ezekiel had had a most desperate struggle with poverty.  At one time, when the family, as Daniel observed, was “heinously unprovided,” we see the much-enduring “Zeke” teaching an Academy by day, an evening school for sailors, and keeping well up with his class in college besides.  But these preliminary troubles were now at an end, and both the brothers took the places won by so much toil and self-sacrifice.

Those are noble old towns on the New England coast, the commerce of which Boston swallowed up forty years ago, while it left behind many a large and liberally provided old mansion, with a family in it enriched by ventures to India and China.  Strangers in Portsmouth are still struck by the largeness and elegance of the residences there, and wonder how such establishments can be maintained in a place that has little “visible means of support.”  It was while Portsmouth was an important seaport that Daniel Webster learned and practised law there, and acquired some note as a Federalist politician.

The once celebrated Dr. Buckminster was the minister of the Congregational church at Portsmouth then.  One Sunday morning in 1808, his eldest daughter sitting alone in the minister’s pew, a strange gentleman was shown into it, whose appearance and demeanor strongly arrested her attention.  The slenderness of his frame, the pale yellow of his complexion, and the raven blackness of his hair, seemed only to bring out into grander relief his ample forehead, and to heighten the effect of his deep-set, brilliant eyes.  At this period of his life there was an air of delicacy and refinement about his face, joined to a kind of strength that women can admire, without fearing.  Miss Buckminster told the family, when she went home from church, that there had been a remarkable person with her in the pew,—­one that she was sure had “a marked character for good or evil.”  A few days after, the remarkable person came to live in the neighborhood, and was soon introduced to the minister’s family as Mr. Daniel Webster, from Franklin, New Hampshire, who was about to open a law office in Portsmouth.  He soon endeared himself