Afterward, Sumner rushed home and eagerly told his father that Webster had quoted the Agricola by Tacitus. His father went straight to the bookcase, took down the Agricola, and turned to chapter forty-five. He asked Sumner to repeat what he remembered Webster saying. When Sumner recited the sentence exactly right, his father was amazed; Charles had remembered it verbatim. “Then I felt proud,” Charles Sumner recalled. “For I understood the sentence; and I felt that I too belonged to the brotherhood of scholars.”
