Help came in an unexpected way.
One day the stalwart farmer entered his house with a look of satisfaction on his dark and rugged features.
“Wife,” he said, “I have been appointed Judge of the Court of Common Pleas for the county.”
“Indeed!” said his wife, naturally pleased at the honor which had been conferred upon her husband.
“It will bring me three to four hundred dollars a year,” said Mr. Webster, “and now I can hope to educate my boys.”
This was his first thought, and hers. It was not proposed to improve their style of living, to buy new furniture or new clothes, but to spend it in such a way as would best promote the interests of those whom God had committed to their keeping.
Three or four hundred dollars! It was a very small sum, so most of my boy readers will think; and so it was, but in a farmer’s household on the bleak acres of New Hampshire it would go a considerable way. Every dollar in Ebenezer Webster’s hands brought its money’s worth, and as we shall see hereafter it brought rich interest to the investor.
But Daniel was still too young for any immediate steps to be taken in the desired direction. He was sent to the small town schools, where he learned what the master was able to teach him. Sometimes he had two and a half and three miles to walk to school, but the farmer’s boy, though delicate, was not thought too delicate for such a walk. Indeed the boy’s delicacy was in his favor, for he was thought not robust enough to work on the farm steadily, and was sent to school, as an elder half-brother, Joseph, laughingly said, “to make him equal with the rest of the boys.” It was hard for those who saw him in later years, in his majestic proportions, to believe that he had been a delicate boy. The tender sapling had become a stately oak, with not a trace of feebleness or lack of strength.
One day when Daniel was at work in the hayfield, about the middle of the forenoon, Judge Webster, for this was his designation now, saw a carriage approaching.