Professor Webster was popular with a large circle of friends. To those who liked him he was a man of pleasing and attractive manners, artistic in his tastes--he was especially fond of music--not a very profound or remarkable chemist, but a pleasant social companion. His temper was hasty and irritable. Spoilt in his boyhood as an only child, he was self-willed and self-indulgent. His wife and daughters were better liked than he. By unfriendly criticics{sic} the Professor was thought to be selfish, fonder of the good things of the table and a good cigar than was consistent with his duty to his family or the smallness of his income. His father, a successful apothecary at Boston, had died in 1833, leaving John, his only son, a fortune of some L10,000. In rather less than ten years Webster had run through the whole of his inheritance. He had built himself a costly mansion in Cambridge, spent a large sum of money in collecting minerals, and delighted to exercise lavish hospitality. By living consistently beyond his means he found himself at length entirely dependent on his professional earnings. These 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.