On the bleak and rugged soil of Salisbury, New Hampshire, in a green nook, hardly sheltered from the wintry blasts, he was born. Under an aged elm, whose branches reach across the highway, stands this ancient habitation. It is in the shadow of lofty mountains, while a broad and rapid river winds through the meadows spread out before the door. "Looking out at the east window," says he, in one of his letters, from this hallowed spot, "my eye sweeps along a level field of one hundred acres. At the end of it, a third of a mile off, I see plain marble grave-stones, designating the places where repose my father and mother, brother and sisters. The fair field is before me. I could see a lamb on any part of it. I have ploughed it, and raked it, but never mowed it; somehow, I could never learn to hang a scythe." As Webster advances, in years and distinction, he seems only to have been drawing a lengthened chain from his first home. With what constancy does he carry its features in his mind, Kearsarge, the Merrimack and Punch Brook! He spares no expense to cultivate the old acres and keep, the old house in repair. With what regularity does he revisit it and explore all his boyish haunts, the orchard, the mill, the meeting-house, the well, the hillside and the trout stream! With what a swelling heart, and moistened eye, does he sit beneath the ancestral elms that stretch their arms, in benediction, over the old homestead, while busy fancy repeoples these familiar scenes with the absent and the dead, the mother that bore him, the father on whose shoulder he wept, the much beloved brother, whose education he earned, "with weary fingers by the midnight lamp?" How from the great popular gathering, from the "sea of upturned faces," and even from the important issues that hung on his eloquence, does his mind impulsively wander to this cherished home--"Raised amid the snow-drifts of New Hampshire, at a period so early that, when the smoke first rose from its rude chimney, and curled over the frozen hills, there was no similar evidence of a white man's habitation between it and the settlements on the rivers of Canada. Its remains still exist. I make to it an annual visit. I carry my children to it to teach them the hardships endured by the generations which have gone before them. I love to dwell on the tender recollections, the kindred ties, the early affections, and the touching narratives and incidents, which mingle with all I know of this primitive family abode. I weep to think that none of those who inhabited it are now among the living; and if ever I am ashamed of it, or if I ever fail in affectionate veneration for HIM who reared and defended it against savage violence and destruction, cherished all the domestic virtues beneath its roof, and, through the fire and blood of seven years' revolutionary war, shrunk from no danger, no toil, no sacrifice to serve his country, and to raise his children to a condition better than his