Captain Webster had secretly nourished the thought that he should send Daniel to college, but he was not a man to awaken false hopes, so he made no mention of his thoughts. An incident related by Daniel shows his father's heart in the matter. "Of a hot day in July, it must have been in one of the last years of Washington's administration, I was making hay with my father. About the middle of the forenoon, the Honorable Abiel Foster, who lived in Canterbury, six miles off, called at the house, and came into the field to see my father. He was a worthy man, college-learned, and had been a minister, and was not a person of any considerable natural power. He talked a while in the field and went on his way. When he was gone, my father called me to him, and we sat down beneath the elm, on a haycock. He said, 'My son, that is a worthy man; he is a member of Congress; he goes to Philadelphia, and gets six dollars a day, while I toil here. It is because he had an education, which I never had. If I had had his early education, I should have been in Philadelphia in his place. I came near it as it was. But I missed it, and now I must work here.' 'My dear father,' said I, 'you shall not work. Brother and I shall work for you, and will wear our hands out, and you shall rest.' And I remember to have cried, and I cry now at the recollection. 'My child,' said he, 'it is of no importance to me. I now live but for my children. I could not give your elder brothers the advantages of knowledge, but I can do something for you. Exert yourself, improve your opportunities, learn, learn, and, when I am gone, you will not need to go through the hardships which I have undergone, and which have made me an old man before my time.'" Daniel never forgot those precious words, "Improve your opportunities, learn, learn." The next year, 1796, he went to Phillips Exeter Academy, where he found ninety boys. He had come with his plain clothes from his plain home, while many of the others had come from rich and aristocratic families. Sometimes the boys ridiculed his country ways and country dress. Little they knew of the future that was to give them some slight renown simply because they happened to be in the same class with this country lad! When will the world learn not to judge a person by his clothes! When the first term at Exeter was near its close, the usher, Nicholas Emery, afterward an eminent lawyer in Portland, Maine, said to Webster, "You may stop a few minutes after school: I wish to speak to you." He then told the lad that he was a better scholar than any in his class, that he learned more readily and easily, and that if he returned to school he should be put into a higher class, and not be hindered by boys who cared more for play and dress than for solid improvement.