These words have doubtless a familiar sound to the reader. They form the phrases which Webster never wearied of repeating, and whenever he had occasion to refer to the beginning of his literary career he fell naturally into this paragraph. It became a formula for the expression of a fact which was embedded in his mind as a stone marking a point of departure. There is a consciousness in it of the beginning of a great enterprise, and certainly, when one considers the immense stream which has flowed from this little rill, he may seriously stand and gaze at the young school-master and his two small elementary books. The modesty of the statement agrees with the size of the books, but not with the expansiveness of the composite title. The work projected by Webster was "A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, comprising an Easy, Concise, and Systematic Method of Education, designed for the Use of English Schools in America." The "Institute" was to be in three parts, which were, in brief, a speller, a grammar, and a reader. The formal and dignified title of the work was the tribute which Webster paid to old-fashioned scholarship; and it is curious to see the evolution by which it finally became the well-known "Elementary." One or two ideas were working their way out in Webster's mind. In the first place he did not like the book generally in use, "Dilworth's New Guide to the English Tongue;" then he saw with more or less clearness that, in the separation from England that was fast taking place, the people in America must necessarily have their own school-books, and his mind ran forward even to a belief in a distinct and separate literature and a considerable difference in language. Yet at this time I am not sure that he appreciated the pregnant truth, so familiar to us now, of a vital connection between popular education and popular sovereignty. He began to see it, and was influenced by it; but his work was mightier than he then knew, for he had not been educated in a free republic.