He came, raised her upon his arm, and, as he did so, she smiled upon him and died.

It is a little incident in the life of a great man, but a child's instinct does not err at such a moment, and her dying smile sheds a flood of soft light upon the deep and warm affections of Mr.Webster's solemn and reserved nature.

It was the first great grief.
Mr.Webster wept convulsively as he stood beside the dead, and those who saw that stately creature so wrung by anguish of the heart never forgot the sight.
Thus the period which began at Portsmouth in 1807 closed in Boston, in 1817, with the death of the eldest born.

In that decade Mr.Webster had advanced with great strides from the position of a raw and youthful lawyer in a back country town of New Hampshire.

He had reached the highest professional eminence in his own State, and had removed to a wider sphere, where he at once took rank with the best lawyers.