youngest boy, not good for much for want of health and strength, but expected to do something.”  That something consisted generally in tending the saw-mill, but the reading went on even there.  He would set a log, and while it was going through would devour a book.  There was a small circulating library in the village, and Webster read everything it contained, committing most of the contents of the precious volumes to memory, for books were so scarce that he believed this to be their chief purpose.

In the year 1791 the brave old soldier, Ebenezer Webster, was made a judge of the local court, and thus got a salary of three or four hundred dollars a year.  This accession of wealth turned his thoughts at once toward that education which he had missed, and he determined that he would give to his children what he had irretrievably lost himself.  Two years later he disclosed his purpose to his son, one hot day in the hay-field, with a manly regret for his own deficiencies and a touching pathos which the boy never forgot.  The next spring his father took Daniel to Exeter Academy.  This was the boy’s first contact with the world, and there was the usual sting which invariably accompanies that meeting.  His school-mates laughed at his rustic dress and manners, and the poor little farm lad felt it bitterly.  The natural and unconscious power by which he had delighted the teamsters was stifled, and the greatest orator of modern times never could summon sufficient courage to stand up and recite verses before these Exeter school-boys.  Intelligent masters, however, perceived something of what was in the lad, and gave him a kindly encouragement.  He rose rapidly in the classes, and at the end of nine months his father took him away in order to place him as a pupil with a neighboring clergyman.  As they drove over, about a month later, to Boscawen, where Dr. Wood, the future preceptor, lived, Ebenezer Webster imparted to his son the full extent of his plan, which was to end in a college education.  The joy at the accomplishment of his dearest and most fervent wish, mingled with a full sense of the magnitude of the sacrifice and of the generosity of his father, overwhelmed the boy.  Always affectionate and susceptible of strong emotion, these tidings overcame him.  He laid his head upon his father’s shoulder and wept.

With Dr. Wood Webster remained only six months.  He went home on one occasion, but haying was not to his tastes.  He found it “dull and lonesome,” and preferred rambling in the woods with his sister in search of berries, so that his indulgent father sent him back to his studies.  With the help of Dr. Wood in Latin, and another tutor in Greek, he contrived to enter Dartmouth College in August, 1797.  He was, of course, hastily and poorly prepared.  He knew something of Latin, very little of Greek, and next to nothing of mathematics, geography, or history.  He had devoured everything in the little libraries of Salisbury and Boscawen, and thus had acquired a desultory knowledge of a limited amount of English literature, including Addison, Pope, Watts, and “Don Quixote.”  But however little he knew, the gates of learning were open, and he had entered the precincts of her temple, feeling dimly but surely the first pulsations of the mighty intellect with which he was endowed.