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.
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