were
small. His salary as Professor was fixed at L240 a year;(15) the rest of
his income he derived from the sale of tickets for his lectures at the
Medical College. That income was insufficient to meet his wants.

(15) I have given these sums of money in their English equivalents
in order to give the reader an idea of the smallness of the sum which
brought about the tragedy.

As early as 1842 he had borrowed L80 from his friend Dr. Parkman. It was
to Parkman's good offices that he owed his appointment as a Professor at
Harvard; they had entered the University as under-graduates in the same
year. Up to 1847 Webster had repaid Parkman twenty pounds of his debt;
but, in that year he found it necessary to raise a further loan of L490,
which was subscribed by a few friends, among them Parkman himself. As
a security for the repayment of this loan, the professor executed a
mortgage on his valuable collection of minerals in favour of Parkman.
In the April of 1848 the Professor's financial difficulties became so
serious that he was threatened with an execution in his house. In this
predicament he went to a Mr. Shaw, Dr. Parkman's brother-in-law, and
begged a loan of L240, offering him as security a bill of sale on the
collection of minerals, which he had already mortgaged to Parkman. Shaw
accepted the security, and lent the money. Shaw would seem to have had
a good deal of sympathy with Webster's embarrassments; he considered the
Professor's income very inadequate to his position, and showed himself
quite ready at a later period to waive his debt altogether.

Dr. Parkman was a less easy-going creditor. Forbearing and patient as
long as he was dealt with fairly, he was merciless where he thought
he detected trickery or evasion. His forbearance and his patience were
utterly exhausted, his anger and indignation strongly aroused, when he
learnt from Shaw that Webster had given him as security for his debt
a bill of sale on the collection of minerals, already mortgaged to
himself. From the moment of the discovery of this act of dishonesty
on the part of Webster, Parkman pursued his debtor with unrelenting
severity.

He threatened him with an action at law; he said openly that he was
neither an honourable, honest, nor upright man; he tried to appropriate
to the payment of his debt the fees for lectures which Mr. Pettee,
Webster's agent, collected on the Professor's behalf. He even visited
Webster in his lecture-room and