"Boston Anthology." During this time he made his first appearance in court,
his father being on the bench. He gathered together a practice worth five
or six hundred a year, a very creditable sum for a young country
practitioner, and won a reputation which made him known in the State.

In April, 1806, after a noble, toiling, unselfish life of sixty-seven
years, Ebenezer Webster died. Daniel assumed his father's debts, waited
until Ezekiel was admitted to the bar, and then, transferring his business
to his brother, moved, in the autumn of 1807, to Portsmouth. This was the
principal town of the State, and offered, therefore, the larger field which
he felt he needed to give his talents sufficient scope. Thus the first
period in his life closed, and he started out on the extended and
distinguished career which lay before him. These early years had been years
of hardship, but they were among the best of his life. Through great
difficulties and by the self-sacrifice of his family, he had made his way
to the threshold of the career for which he was so richly endowed. He had
passed an unblemished youth; he had led a clean, honest, hard-working life;
he was simple, manly, affectionate. Poverty had been a misfortune, not
because it had warped or soured him, for he smiled at it with cheerful
philosophy, nor because it had made him avaricious, for he never either
then or at any time cared for money for its own sake, and nothing could
chill the natural lavishness of his disposition. But poverty accustomed him
to borrowing and to debt, and this was a misfortune to a man of Mr.
Webster's temperament. In those early days he was anxious to pay his debts;
but they did not lie heavy upon him or carry a proper sense of
responsibility, as they did to Ezekiel and to his father. He was deeply in
debt; his books, even, were bought with borrowed money, all which was
natural and inevitable; but the trouble was that it never seems to have
weighed upon him or been felt by him as of much importance. He was thus
early brought into the habit of debt, and was led unconsciously to regard