It happened to me, when I was in college, to be once on some business at an office on State Street in Boston, then as now the central business street of the place, in a second-story office where there were a number of young men writing busily at their desks. Presently one of the youths, passing by accident across the room, stopped suddenly and said,—
"There is Daniel Webster!"
In an instant every desk in that room was vacated, every pane in every window was filled with a face looking out, and I, hastening up behind them, found it difficult to get a view of the street so densely had they crowded round it. And once looking out, I saw all up and down the street, in every window I could see, just the same mass of eager faces behind the windows. Those faces were all concentrated on a certain figure, a farmer-like, sunburned man who stood, roughly clothed, with his hands behind him, speaking to no one, looking nowhere in particular; waiting, so far as I could see, for nothing, with broad shoulders and heavy muscles, and the head of a hero above. Such a brow, such massive formation, such magnificent black eyes, such straight black eyebrows I had never seen before.
That man, it appeared, was Daniel Webster! I saw people go along the street sidling along past him, looking up at him as if he were the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World in New York harbor. Nobody knew what he wanted, it never was explained; he may have been merely waiting for some companion to go fishing. But there he was, there he stands in my memory. I don't know what happened afterwards, or how these young men ever got back to their desks—if they ever did.
For me, however, that figure was revealed by one brief duplicate impression, which came in a few months afterwards when I happened to be out in Brookline, a suburb of Boston, where people used to drive then, as they drive now, on summer afternoons for afternoon tea—only, afternoon tea not having been invented, they drove out to their neighbors' houses for fruit or a cup of chocolate.
You have heard Boston perhaps called the "Hub of the universe." A lady, not a Bostonian, once said that if Boston were the hub of the universe, Brookline ought to be called the "Sub-hub." In the "sub-hub" I was sitting in the house of a kinsman who had a beautiful garden; who was the discoverer, in fact, of the Boston nectarine, which all the world came to his house to taste. I heard voices in the drawing-room and went in there. And there I saw again before me the figure of that day on State street, but it was the figure of a man with a beamingly good- natured face, seated in a solid chair brought purposely to accommodate his weight, sitting there with the simple culinary provision of a cup of chocolate in his hand.
It so happened that the great man, the godlike Daniel, as the people used to call him, had expressed the very mortal wish for a little more sugar in his chocolate; and I, if you please, was the fortunate youth who, passing near him, was selected as the Ganymede to bring to him the refreshment desired. I have felt ever since that I, at least, was privileged to put one drop of sweetness into the life of that great man, a life very varied and sometimes needing refreshment. And I have since been given by my classmates to understand—I find they recall it to this day—that upon walking through the college yard for a week or two after that opportunity, I carried my head so much higher than usual as to awaken an amount of derision which undoubtedly, if it had been at West Point, would have led to a boxing match.
That was Daniel Webster, one of the two great lawyers of Boston—I might almost say, of the American bar at that time.
THE ENDURING VALUE OF SPEECH
From the author's lectures on oratory, with his permission