Much of the boy's time was spent in rambles along the Merrimac river, formed by the Winnipiseogee and the Pemigewasset, "the beau ideal of a mountain stream; cold, noisy, winding, and with banks of much picturesque beauty." He loved to fish along the streams, having for company an old British soldier and sailor, Robert Wise. "He was," says Webster, "my Isaac Walton. He had a wife but no child. He loved me, because I would read the newspapers to him, containing the accounts of battles in the European wars. When I have read to him the details of the victories of Howe and Jervis, etc., I remember he was excited almost to convulsions, and would relieve his excitement by a gush of exulting tears. He finally picked up a fatherless child, took him home, sent him to school, and took care of him, only, as he said, that he might have some one to read the newspaper to him. He could never read himself. Alas, poor Robert! I have never so attained the narrative art as to hold the attention of others as thou, with thy Yorkshire tongue, hast held mine. Thou hast carried me many a mile on thy back, paddled me over and over and up and down the stream, and given whole days in aid of my boyish sports, and asked no meed but that, at night, I would sit down at thy cottage door, and read to thee some passage of thy country's glory!" Daniel heard of battles from another source beside Robert Wise. In the long winter evenings, when the family were snow-bound, Captain Webster would tell stories of the Revolutionary War, and the boy grew patriotic, as he heard of the brave soldiers who died to bring freedom to unborn generations. When he was eight years old, with all the money at his command, twenty-five cents, he went into a little shop "and bought," as he says, "a small cotton pocket-handkerchief, with the Constitution of the United States printed on its two sides. From this I learned either that there was a Constitution, or that there were thirteen States. I remember to have read it, and have known more or less of it ever since." Years afterward he said, "that there was not an article, a section, a clause, a phrase, a word, a syllable, or even a comma, of that Constitution, which he had not studied and pondered in every relation and in every construction of which it was susceptible." How important a part this twenty-five cent handkerchief played in the lives of the two Webster boys! There is no soil so mellow as that of a child's mind; it needs no enriching save love that warms it like sunshine. What is planted there early, grows rank and tall, and mothers do most of the planting.