His expectations of a largely increased professional income were fully realized. In Portsmouth his fees had never exceeded two thousand dollars per year. The third year after his removal his fee-book foots up over fifteen thousand dollars as the receipts of a single year, and this record is probably incomplete. His biographer, Mr. Curtis, says: “I am satisfied that his income, from 1818 until he again entered Congress in 1823, could not have been on an average less than $20,000 a year, though the customary fees of such counsel at that time were about one half of what they are now.” Now, for the first time, he was able to pay in full his father’s debts, which he had voluntarily assumed, declining to have his small estate thrown into bankruptcy. I shall have occasion, hereafter, to point out with regret the fact that his expenses increased even more rapidly than his income, and that he voluntarily incurred debts and pecuniary obligations which all his life long harassed him, and held him in an entirely unnecessary thraldom. On the subject of national finance Mr. Webster, as we have seen, held the soundest views; but in the management of his own finances, for the larger portion of his active life he displayed an incapacity to control his expenditures and confine them within his income which caused his best friends to grieve. In this respect, at any rate, I cannot present the hero whom we so deservedly admire as a model. The large increase in Mr. Webster’s income is sufficient to prove that he was employed in the most important cases. But fifteen years had elapsed since, as a raw graduate of a country college, he humbly sought an opportunity to study in the office of a well-known Boston lawyer. Now he took his place at the bar, and rapidly gained a much higher position than the man who had kindly extended to him a welcome. It is to the credit of Mr. Gore’s ability to read character and judge of ability that he foresaw and predicted all this when through his influence his student was led to decline the clerkship of a New Hampshire court, which then would have filled the measure of his ambition. And how was all this gained? I can assure my young readers that no great lawyer, no great writer, no great member of any profession, lounges into greatness. Daniel Webster worked, and worked hard. He rose early, not only because it gave him an opportunity of doing considerable while he was fresh and elastic, but because he had a country boy’s love of nature. Whether in city or country, the early morning hours were dear to him. As Mr. Lee says, “He did a large amount of work before others were awake in the house, and in the evening he was ready for that sweet sleep which ‘God gives to his beloved.’”