THE BOYHOOD OF DANIEL WEBSTER.[A]
Daniel Webster, the great statesman, orator, and lawyer, was born on the 18th of January, 1782.
His father lived near the head-waters of the Merrimac River, and the only school within reach was a poor one kept open for a few months every winter. There Webster learned all that the country schoolmaster could teach him, which was very little; but he acquired a taste which did more for him than the reading, writing, and arithmetic of the school. He learned to like books, and to want knowledge; and when a boy gets really hungry and thirsty for knowledge it is not easy to keep him ignorant. When some of the neighbors joined in setting up a little circulating library, young Webster read every book in it two or three times, and even committed to memory a large part of the best of them. It was this eagerness for education on his part that led his father afterwards to send him to Exeter to school, and later to put him into Dartmouth College.
There are not many boys in our time who have not declaimed parts of Webster's great speeches; and it will interest them to know that the boy who afterwards made those speeches could never declaim at all while he was at school. He learned his pieces well, and practised them in his own room, but he could not speak them before people to save his life.
Webster was always fond of shooting and fishing, and, however hard he studied, the people around him called him lazy and idle, because he would spend whole days in these sports. Once, while he was studying under Dr. Woods to prepare for college, that gentleman spoke to him on the subject, and hurt his feelings a little. The boy went to his room determined to have revenge, and this is the way he took to get it. The usual Latin lesson was one hundred lines of Virgil, but Webster spent the whole night over the book. The next morning before breakfast he went to Dr. Woods and read the whole lesson correctly. Then he said:
"Will you hear a few more lines, doctor?"
The teacher consenting, Webster read on and on and on, while the breakfast grew cold. Still there was no sign of the boy's stopping, and the hungry doctor at last asked how much farther he was prepared to read.
"To the end of the twelfth book of the Æneid," answered the "idle" boy, in triumph.
After that, Webster did not give up his hunting and fishing, but he worked so hard at his lessons, and got on so fast, that there was no further complaint of his "idleness." He not only learned the lessons given to him, but more, every day, and besides this he read every good book he could lay his hands on, for he was not at all satisfied to know only what could be found in the school-books.