" 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.
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