frantic efforts to shake hands with their hero-president they nearly crushed him to death. President Jackson treated his political enemies as he did the Indians and the English. He turned thousands of men out of office and appointed his friends in their places. “To the victors belong the spoils,” he said, but most people to-day believe the warlike President had the wrong idea in treating public service as “spoils of war.” After serving his country as President, Andrew Jackson lived at the Hermitage, a beautiful mansion he had built near Nashville, Tennessee. When the aged ex-President knew he was dying, he called his friends and slaves around his bed and told them he wanted them all to meet him in heaven. When the simple but grand old hero died, they found his dead wife’s miniature close to his heart where he had worn it for many years. Then they remembered that, rough and violent as he often had been with men, he had never spoken a cross or cruel word to his wife or any of his own household. “The bravest are the tenderest.” WEBSTER, CLAY, CALHOUN, THREE GREAT CHAMPIONS IN CONGRESS “There were giants in those days,” a hundred years ago in the United States of America; not giants in body, but in mind and heart. Besides the Presidents and the generals in the War of 1812 and the Indian wars, the greatest men in America were Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, who were in Congress together. Daniel Webster was the man of New England, Henry Clay of the west, and John C. Calhoun of the south. Daniel Webster was born among the hills of New Hampshire, the ninth of the ten children of his father. He had a huge head, a high forehead, and great, deep, inquiring eyes. Webster once said that he did not remember when he could not read the Bible. He learned chapter after chapter of it by heart and remembered them all his life. [Illustration: CLAY, CALHOUN AND WEBSTER, “THE STATESMEN OF THE COMPROMISE.” (From left to right.) _From the painting by A. Tholey_] Daniel’s father lived on a rocky farm in New Hampshire and had a hard time to educate his growing family. He was called Captain Webster because he had been an officer in the War for Independence. His children used to delight in hearing about General Washington. After Daniel grew to be a great man he was proud to tell how the Father of his Country had trusted his father. Once he said, “I should rather have it said upon my father’s tombstone that he had guarded the person of George Washington and was worthy of such a trust, than to have carved upon it the greatest title that the world could give.” Captain Webster said to his son one day after a gentleman who was riding by had stopped to speak to him: “Dan, that man beat me by a few votes when I ran against him for Congress, and all because he had a better education. For that reason I intend you shall have a good education, and I hope to see you work your way up to Congress.”