In the campaign of 1844 Elizur Wright made a number of speeches for the Free-soil candidate in various New England cities. One morning he was returning from a celebration at Nashua, when at the Lowell station Daniel Webster entered the train with two or three friends, and turned over the seat next to Mr. Wright. A newsboy followed Webster, and they all purchased papers. Elizur Wright purchased a Whig paper, and seeing a statement in it concerning the Free-soil candidate which he believed from internal evidence to be untrue, he said quite loud: "Well! this is the finest roorback I have met with." Webster inquired what it was, and, after looking at the statement, pronounced it genuine. A short argument ensued, which closed with Webster's proposing to bet forty pounds that the allegation was true. "I am not a betting man," replied Wright, "but since the honor of my candidate is at stake, I accept your wager." Webster then gave him his card, and Wright returned it by writing his name on a piece of the newspaper. Elizur Wright no sooner reached his office than he found letters and documents there disproving the Whig statement _in toto_, and later in the day he carried them over to Mr. Webster, who had an office in what was then Niles's Block. Mr. Webster looked carefully through them, congratulated Mr. Wright on his good fortune, and handed him two hundred- dollar bills. Peter Harvey, who was in Webster's office at the time, afterwards stopped Elizur Wright on the sidewalk and said to him: "Mr. Wright, you could have afforded to lose that wager much better than Webster could." It is remarkable how all the different interests in this man's life-- mathematics, philanthropy, journalism, and the translation of La Fontaine--united together like so many different currents to further the grand achievement of his life. While in England he had taken notice of the life-insurance companies there, which were in a more advanced stage than those in America. They interested him as a mathematical study, and also from the humanitarian point of view. He purchased "David Jones on Annuities," and the best works on life insurance. These he read with the same ardor with which young ladies devour an exciting novel, and without the least expectation that they might ever bring dollars and cents to him; until one day in the spring of 1852 an insurance solicitor placed an advertising booklet in his hand as he was entering the office of the _Chronotype_.