He paid special attention also to oratory. No longer shrinking from speaking before his classmates, he voluntarily composed the pieces he declaimed, and took an active part besides in the debating society. I am sure my young reader will like to know how Daniel wrote at this time, and will like to compare the oratory of the college student with that of the future statesman. I shall, therefore, quote from a Fourth of July oration, which he delivered by invitation to the citizens and students at the age of eighteen. As in a boy’s features we trace a general likeness to his mature manhood, so I think we may trace a likeness in passages of this early effort to the speeches he made in the fullness of his fame. This is the opening of the address: “_Countrymen, Brethren and Fathers_: We are now assembled to celebrate an anniversary, ever to be held in dear remembrance by the sons of freedom. Nothing less than the birth of a nation, nothing less than the emancipation of three millions of people from the degrading chains of foreign bondage is the event we commemorate. “Twenty-four years have this day elapsed since these United States first raised the standard of liberty, and echoed the shouts of independence. Those of you who were then reaping the iron harvest of the martial field, whose bosoms then palpitated for the honor of America, will at this time experience a renewal of all that fervent patriotism, of all those indescribable emotions which then agitated your breasts. As for us, who were either then unborn, or not far enough advanced beyond the threshold of existence to engage in the grand conflict for liberty, we now most cordially unite with you to greet the return of this joyous anniversary, to welcome the return of the day that gave us freedom, and to hail the rising glories of our country.” Further on he paints the hardships and distresses through which the colonists had passed: “We behold a feeble band of colonists engaged in the arduous undertaking of a new settlement in the wilds of North America. Their civil liberty being mutilated, and the enjoyment of their religious sentiments denied them in the land that gave them birth, they braved the dangers of the then almost unnavigated ocean, and sought on the other side of the globe an asylum from the iron grasp of tyranny and the more intolerable scourge of ecclesiastical persecution. “But gloomy indeed was the prospect when arrived on this side of the Atlantic.