to every person in the minister’s circle, and to no one more than to the minister himself, who, among other services, taught him the art of preserving his health.  The young man, like the old clergyman, was an early riser, up with the dawn in summer, and long before the dawn in winter; and both were out of doors with the sun, each at one end of a long saw, cutting wood for an appetite.  The joyous, uncouth singing and shouting of the newcomer aroused the late sleepers.  Then in to breakfast, where the homely, captivating humor of the young lawyer kept the table in a roar, and detained every inmate.  “Never was there such an actor lost to the stage,” Jeremiah Mason, his only rival at the New Hampshire bar, used to say, “as he would have made.”  Returning in the afternoon from court, fatigued and languid, his spirits rose again with food and rest, and the evening was another festival of conversation and reading.  A few months after his settlement at Portsmouth he visited his native hills, saying nothing respecting the object of his journey; and returned with a wife,—­that gentle and high-bred lady, a clergyman’s daughter, who was the chief source of the happiness of his happiest years, and the mother of all his children.  He improved in health, his form expanded, his mind grew, his talents ripened, his fame spread, during the nine years of his residence at this thriving and pleasant town.

At Portsmouth, too, he had precisely that external stimulus to exertion which his large and pleasure-loving nature needed.  Jeremiah Mason was, literally speaking, the giant of the American bar, for he stood six feet seven inches in his stockings.  Like Webster, he was the son of a valiant Revolutionary officer; like Webster, he was an hereditary Federalist; like Webster, he had a great mass of brain:  but his mind was more active and acquisitive than Webster’s, and his nineteen years of arduous practice at the bar had stored his memory with knowledge and given him dexterity in the use of it.  Nothing shows the eminence of Webster’s talents more than this, that, very early in his Portsmouth career, he should have been regarded at the bar of New Hampshire as the man to be employed against Jeremiah Mason, and his only fit antagonist.  Mason was a vigilant, vigorous opponent,—­sure to be well up in the law and the facts of a cause, sure to detect a flaw in the argument of opposing counsel.  It was in keen encounters with this wary and learned man that Daniel Webster learned his profession; and this he always acknowledged.  “If,” he said once in conversation,—­

“if anybody thinks I am somewhat familiar with the law on some points, and should be curious to know how it happened, tell him that Jeremiah Mason compelled me to study it. He was my master.”

It is honorable, too, to both of them, that, rivals as they were, they were fast and affectionate friends, each valuing in the other the qualities in which he was surpassed by him, and each sincerely believing