"I read what I could get to read, went to school when I could, and when not at school, was a farmer's youngest boy, not good for much for want of health and strength, but expected to do something." That something consisted generally in tending the saw-mill, but the reading went on even there.

He would set a log, and while it was going through would devour a book.

There was a small circulating library in the village, and Webster read everything it contained, committing most of the contents of the precious volumes to memory, for books were so scarce that he believed this to be their chief purpose.
In the year 1791 the brave old soldier, Ebenezer Webster, was made a judge of the local court, and thus got a salary of three or four hundred dollars a year.

This accession of wealth turned his thoughts at once toward that education which he had missed, and he determined that he would give to his children what he had irretrievably lost himself.

Two years later he disclosed his purpose to his son, one hot day in the hay-field, with a manly regret for his own deficiencies and a touching pathos which the boy never forgot.