Long, Rapine, Watterson, McCormick, Caldwell, Elliott, B. and C. Burns, Ricks, Crampton, and General Washington; and the dwellings burnt were those of Messrs. Sewell, Ball, Frost, Phillips, Tomlinson, and Mrs. Hamilton, including the large hotel belonging to David Carroll, of Duddington & Co. In his official report, Admiral Cockburn boastingly said, "In short, sir, I do not believe a vestige of public property or store of any kind which could be converted to the use of the Government, escaped destruction." H. K.] CHAPTER XIII. THE PENALTY ENVELOPES: A LITTLE INSIDE HISTORY REGARDING THEIR INTRODUCTION. It would require several pages to present a detailed account of my years of vexatious, gratuitous labor in obtaining the introduction of the official "penalty envelope;" but the following article which I furnished to the Boston Herald of July 12, 1894, must suffice for the present occa sion: In the Herald of the 9th inst., there is what appears to be a valuable historical account of United States postagestamps, but it doubtless contains some errors, one of which I respectfully ask sufficient space to point out, since something of my own action ten years and over after I left the post-office department is connected with it. The writer states: "In order to put a stop to abuses of the franking privilege, official stamps were provided in 1873 for each of the executive departments of the government for use on official matter sent through the mails. They were of about the same denominations as the ordinary stamps for the use of the public. After a few years' trial they were gradually abandoned, and in their place the post-office department issued official penalty envelopes for official business. The last of the official stamps, which turned out to be a still greater source of abuse than the old franking practice, came to pass in 1879." The first act authorizing the use of the penalty envelope bears date March 4, 1877, when it went into effect at once. Its use would have been universal in the executive departments but for a decision of the Attorney-General that, Congress having made an appropriation for departmental postage-stamps at the same time, it was its intention that both the penalty envelopes and stamps might be used. It was natural for the third assistant postmaster-general, the financial officer of the department, to ask an appropriation for the stamps then in use, as it was not known whether the penalty envelope would be authorized or not; but, when the question arose, Senator Hamlin, chairman of the committee on post-offices and post-roads, who had requested me to submit my device to the committee (for I may be allowed, as I have the right in justice to myself, to say it was my device), wrote to me from his home in Bangor, saying: "You and I know it was the purpose of the law that the penalty envelope should take the place of the departmental stamps." However, he advised that I should seek for remedy by an amended bill, which I prepared, with various improvements, taking care to add a clause, as I did in the first bill, repealing the stamp act, and this was presented at the next session of Congress. When it came finally to pass, on March 4, 1879, as bad luck would have it, it was tacked on to the general post-office appropriation bill, as the first had been, leaving out the repealing clause. Meantime the third assistant continued to ask for the stamp appropriation, in defiance of the purpose and desire to get rid of the stamps, which the adjutant-general and commissioner of internal revenue both, I remember, denounced as an intolerable nuisance; and so both systems were kept up, to the annoyance of all the departments, except the postoffice, where the penalty envelope was universally used from the passage of the first act. To make a long story short, I drew a third bill and “lobbied" for it, pro bono publico, both through the press and in Congress, until at length, in spite of the persistent opposition of the third assistant postmaster-general, who, strange to say, was allowed to have his own way in the matter, the amended act became a law, broader in its scope than originally intended, and forbidding the further use of the departmental stamps on July 5, 1884. Thereupon the stamps in enormous quantities, mostly in the hands of the contractors, were ordered to be destroyed. Now, I do not hesitate to say that, had the first penalty envelope act been allowed, as it was intended, entirely to supplant the official stamps, the government, in the seven years or more I literally fought for this reform, might have saved in clerk hire, the prevention of fraud, etc., thousands upon thousands of dollars. CHAPTER XIV. AN HOUR WITH DANIEL WEBSTER. EVERYTHING relating to Daniel Webster is of interest, from his boyhood to the close of his life, October 24, 1852, at the age of threescore years and ten. The autobiography of his early life plainly shows "the stuff he was made of," exhibiting, as it does, the essential features of the best New England character. In the first school he attended, only reading and writing were taught, and as to these, he says, "the first I generally could perform better than the teacher, and the last a good master could hardly instruct me in; writing was so laborious, irksome, and repulsive an occupation to me always. My masters used to tell me that they feared, after all, my fingers were destined for the ploughtail." In May, 1796, young Webster was placed in Phillips Academy, at Exeter, New Hampshire, where his instructors were Mr. Thacher, afterward judge of the municipal court of Boston, and Nicholas Emery, subsequently a distinguished counsellor and judge of the supreme court, well known to the writer, at Portland. Says Mr. Webster: "I am proud to call them both masters. I believe I made tolerable progress in most branches which I attended to, while in school; but there was one thing I could not do. I could not make a declamation; I could not speak before the school. The kind and excellent Buckminster [his Latin teacher] sought, especially, to persuade me to perform the exercises of declamation, like other boys, but I could not do it. Many a piece did I commit to memory and recite, and rehearse, in my own room, over and over again; yet when the day came, when the school collected to hear declamations, when my name was called, and I saw all eyes turned to my seat, I could not raise myself from it. Sometimes the instructors frowned, sometimes they smiled. Mr. Buckminster always pressed and entreated, most winningly, that I would venture; but I could never command sufficient resolution. When the occasion was over, I went home and wept bitter tears of mortification." His instructors well knew how greatly success in life often depends on the ability to give free utterance to one's sentiments, without embarrassment, before a public assembly; and hence their urgency. What but that invaluable talent, or acquisition, assures the preference to many over their associates, who, in point of general information, are in all respects their equals if not superiors, but whose speeches, when called for, lie hidden, as it were, and only come to the mind with facility and triumphant effect when they are safe from observation,-oftener than otherwise, in bed. In 1802, at twenty years of age, Mr. Webster went to Fryeburg, Maine, "to keep school," at the rate of three hundred and fifty dollars per annum. This (he says) was no small thing, for "I compared it not with what might be before me, but what was actually behind me. It was better, certainly, than following the plough." At an earlier date, he says: "I was fond of poetry. By far the greater part of Watts's psalms and hymns I could repeat at ten or twelve years of age. I am sure no other sacred poetry will ever appear to me so affecting and devout." About the same time, when his father brought home a copy of Pope's "Essay on Man," he says, "I took it and very soon could repeat it from beginning to end." Webster was not only fond of poetry, as evinced by his poetic quotations in correspondence and speeches, but he sometimes courted the muses, his poetical inspirations not infrequently appearing in rhyme as well as in his prose productions. One of his earlier poems was addressed to George Herbert, supposed to be one of his college companions, on leaving Dartmouth College, December 20, 1798. He deplores their separation in twenty-two lines of heroic measure, and closes with this stanza: "Let love and friendship reign, Let virtue join the train Till Phoebus' blaze expire; Till God who rules on high And earth be wrapped in fire." In a letter from Salisbury, February, 1809, to an associate whom he addressed familiarly as "Brother Bingham,” there is a hint that a Mr. Clark, another friend, had heard that he "was just about to (try to) be married;" and he introduces these original lines, presumably to describe the maiden in the case: แ "Bright Phoebus long all rival suns outshone, |