As a soldier, he was a brave, wise, skilful leader; as a statesman, honest, earnest, fearless, true--"I do precisely what I think just and right." Said a friend who knew him well, "There was more of the woman in his nature than in that of any man I ever knew--more of woman's tenderness toward children, and sympathy with them. Often has he been known, though he never had a child of his own, to walk up and down by the hour with an infant in his arms, because by so doing he relieved it from the cause of its crying; more also of woman's patience and uncomplaining, unnoticing submissiveness to trivial causes of irritation. There was in him a womanly modesty and delicacy.... By no man was the homage due to woman, the only true homage she can receive--faith in her--more devoutly rendered.... This peculiar tenderness of nature entered largely, no doubt, into the composition of that _manner_ of his, with which so many have been struck, and which was of the highest available stamp as regards both dignity and grace." Much of what he was in character he owed to Rachel Jackson. He once said to a prominent man, "My wife was a pious Christian woman. She gave me the best advice, and I have not been unmindful of it. When the people, in their sovereign pleasure, elected me President of the United States, _she_ said to me, 'Don't let your popularity turn your mind away from the duty you owe to God. Before him we are all alike sinners, and to him we must all alike give account. All these things will pass away, and you and I and all of us must stand before God.' I have never forgotten it, and I never shall." [Illustration: DANIEL WEBSTER.] DANIEL WEBSTER. In the little town of Salisbury, New Hampshire, now called Franklin, Daniel Webster was born, January 18, 1782, the ninth in a family of ten children. Ebenezer, the father, descended from a sturdy Puritan ancestry, had fought in the French and Indian Wars; a brave, hardy pioneer. He had cleared the wilderness for his log house, married a wife who bore him five children, after which she died, and then married a second time, Abigail Eastman, a woman of vigorous understanding, yet tender and self-sacrificing. Of the five children of the latter wife, three daughters and two sons, Daniel was the fourth, a slight, delicate child, whose frail body made him especially dear to the mother, who felt that at any time he might be taken out of her arms forever. "In this hut," said Webster, years later, speaking of his father and mother, "they endured together all sorts of privations and hardships; my mother was constantly visited by Indians, who had never gone to a white man's house but to kill its inhabitants, while my father, perhaps, was gone, as he frequently was, miles away, carrying on his back the corn to be ground, which was to support his family."