the most successful, and the leader of the bar in New
Hampshire could not earn two thousand. The chief employment of Daniel
Webster, during the first year or two of his practice, was collecting
debts due in New Hampshire to merchants in Boston. His first tin sign
has been preserved to the present day, to attest by its minuteness and
brevity the humble expectations of its proprietor. "D. Webster,
Attorney," is the inscription it bears. The old Court-House still
stands in which he conducted his first suit, before his own father as
presiding judge. Old men in that part of New Hampshire were living
until within these few years, who remembered well seeing this tall,
gaunt, and large-eyed young lawyer rise slowly, as though scarcely
able to get upon his feet, and giving to every one the impression that
he would soon be obliged to sit down from mere physical weakness, and
saying to his father, for the first and last time, "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