reater
part of that weighty discourse to excite a youthful auditor;
but the great thing was to look at the great orator. Waldo
Emerson, who was there, said of him:

"His countenance, his figure, and his manners were all in
so grand a style that he was, without effort, as superior to
his most eminent rivals as they were to the humblest. He
alone of men did not disappoint the eye and the ear, but
was a fit figure in the landscape. There was the Monument,
and there was Webster. He knew well that a little more or
less of rhetoric signified nothing; he was only to say plain
and equal things--grand things, if he had them; and if he
had them not, only to abstain from saying unfit things--and
the whole occasion was answered by his presence."

He went almost through his weighty discourse without much
effect upon his auditors other than that which Emerson so
well described. But the wind changed before he finished,
and blew toward the other quarter where the boys stood; and
he almost lifted them from their feet as his great organ tones
rolled out his closing sentences:

"And when both we and our children shall have been consigned
to the house appointed for all living, may love of country
and pride of country glow with equal fervor among those to
whom our names and our blood shall have descended! And then,
when honored and decrepit age shall lean against the base
of this monument, and troops of ingenuous youth shall be gathered
around it, and when the one shall speak to the other of its
objects, the purposes of its construction, and the great and
glorious events with which it is connected, there shall rise
from every youthful breast the ejaculation, 'Thank God, I
also--AM AN AMERICAN!'"

Mr. Webster came to Concord in the summer of 1843 as counsel
for William Wyman, President of the Phoenix Bank of Charlestown,
who was indicted for embezzling the funds of the bank. This
was one of the _causes celebres_ of the day. Wyman had been
a business man of high standing. Such offences were rare
in those days, and the case would have attracted great attention
whoever had been for the defence. But the defendant's counsel
were Daniel Webster, Rufus Choate, Franklin Dexter, and my
brother, E. R. Hoar, a young man lately admitted to the bar.
Mr. Webster, notwithstanding his great fame as a statesman,
is said never to have lost his eager interest in causes in
which he was retained. When he found himself hard pressed,
he put for