e enemy's bombs into country villages, was
likely to think with all the eagerness of youth upon questions of
political ethics, and of the broad grounds of human freedom. There are
two words often used in the ephemeral literature of that day,--_slave_,
_free_,--words used somewhat recklessly at times, but marking the
general current of men's thoughts.

Webster, in one of his reminiscences, recalls the wretched condition of
affairs when he was in college: "So impoverished was the country at one
time," he writes, "that the steward of the college could not supply the
necessary provisions of the table, and the students were compelled to
return to spend several months at home. At one time goods were so scarce
that the farmers cut corn-stalks and crushed them in cider-mills, and
then boiled the juice down to a syrup as a substitute for sugar." The
years which followed his graduation were, if anything, still more
discouraging. When he went home, after Commencement, his father gave him
an eight-dollar bill of the Continental currency, worth then about fifty
cents on the dollar, and left him to his own resources. His plan was to
study law, but his first business was to maintain himself, and he took
up school-teaching, spending the winter of 1778 in Glastonbury, where
he had gone with his class the year before. In the summer of 1779 he
returned to Hartford and taught there, living in the family of Mr.,
afterward Chief Justice, Oliver Ellsworth, and picking up a little law.
In the hard winter of 1780 he taught in his native village, and in the
next summer he lived with and assisted Jedediah Strong, register of
deeds in Litchfield, where he read law, and then was admitted to the bar
in Hartford.

There was, however, no business. People were too poor to go to law, and
the whole country was depressed by its condition. The struggle for
independence had not been a short, sharp one, marked by an intense flame
of enthusiasm; the end was reached less by heroic endeavor than by
heroic patience and the wisdom of a few. The depths of ignominy into
which Continental currency had sunk measured the hopelessness with which
those who lived by wits rather than by manual labor surveyed the field.
So, relinquishing the law, Webster resumed teaching, this time in
Sharon. An advertisement gives notice of what he expected to do in his
school:--

"On the first of May will be opened, at Sharon in Connecticut, a school,
in which children may be instruct