Boscawen

Mrs. Minot, a few years before Dr. Ripley's petition in her behalf, came near having a more distinguished son-in-law, Daniel Webster, who, like the young Dunbars, was in New Hampshire born and a year or two older than Mrs. Minot's daughter, Louisa Dunbar.

He had passed through Dartmouth College a little in love with two or three of the young ladies of Hanover and had returned to his native town of Salisbury, New Hampshire, when he met at Boscawen nearby, Miss Louisa, who, like Miss Grace Fletcher, whom he married a few years afterward, was teaching a school in one of the New Hampshire towns.

Miss Dunbar made an impression on Webster's heart, always susceptible, and had the Fates been propitious, he might have called Henry Thoreau "nephew" in after years, but the silken tie was broken before it was fairly knit.

I suspect that she was the person referred by one of Webster's biographers, who says, speaking of an incident that occurred in January 1805, "Mr.

He had been somewhat interested in another lady, who was occasionally referred to in his letters, written after he left college, but who was not either of those whom he had known at Hanover.

But this affair never proceeded very far, and he had entirely dismissed it from his mind before he went to Boston in 1804." In January 1806, about the time of his father's death, Webster wrote to a college friend, "I am not married and seriously am inclined to think I never shall be," though he was then a humble suitor to Grace Fletcher.

Louisa Dunbar was a lively, dark-haired, large-eyed, pleasing young lady who had perhaps been educated in part at Boscawen, where Webster studied for college and afterwards was a schoolteacher there.

She received from him those attentions which young men give to young ladies without any very active thoughts of marriage.