comes every guest and caller;
he personally supervises the disposal of their baggage and the selection
of their chambers; he himself has ordered the dinner--mutton which he
has raised, fish which he has caught--and it is being cooked by Monica,
the Southern slave whose freedom he purchased for her. He carves at
table, priding himself on his dispatch and nicety, and keeps an eye on
the needs of every one at the long board. Everything, every one in the
house is irresistibly drawn about this magnetic center which dominates
by its innate power of personality more than by any deliberate
intention. His children worship him; his wife idolizes him; each man and
woman on the place regards him with admiring affection. And in such
congenial atmosphere he expands, is genial, kindly, delightful. But
devoted as he is to his home, his family, and his friends, and charming
as he shows himself with them, yet it is not until we see him striding
over the farm which he has bought that we see the Daniel Webster who is
destined to live most graphically in the memories of those who like to
think of great men in those intimate moments which are most personally
characteristic of them.

We must rise early in the morning if we would accompany him on his day's
round. He himself is up at sunrise, for the sunrise is to him signal to
new life. As he once wrote: "Among all our good people not one in a
thousand sees the sun rise once a year. They know nothing of the
morning. Their idea of it is that part of the day which comes along
after a cup of coffee and a beefsteak or a piece of toast. With them
morning is not a new issuing of light, a new bursting forth of the sun,
a new waking up of all that has life from a sort of temporary death, to
behold again the works of God, the heavens and the earth.... The first
faint streak of light, the earliest purpling of the east which the lark
springs up to greet, and the deeper and deeper coloring into orange and
red, till at length the 'glorious sun is seen, regent of the day'--this
they never enjoy, for they never see it."

So four o'clock finds Webster up and dressed and bound for the little
study in his garden (the only building spared by the fire which
destroyed the house in 1878) and beginning his correspondence. If he has
no secretary he writes himself, and by time breakfast is announced
twenty letters, all franked and sealed, are ready to be posted.

"Now," he says, smiling benignantly down the long bre