description he could not bear, and he would not tolerate it for a night. He was not a slave. The blood of freemen thrilled his veins. His kinsman,.Abraham, had fought at Concord; and Solomon had fought for liberty and manhood at Bunker Hill. He was not long in tying his few garments into a bundle, and then he announced to the "black-salter" that he was going home, not to return. "The worthy man saw the main prop of his fortunes falling, and demeaned himself accordingly. But entreaties and remonstrances were alike unavailing. Outraged dignity would not be appeased; so, in half an hour, James, with his little bundle of clothes on his shoulder, was on his way homeward."

His mother received him with open arms and a blessing. "Providence," she said, "will open some better way for you, my son.

In the summer of his sixteenth year, when the "haying season was over, he made an agreement with his uncle, Thomas Garfield, who lived in Newburgh, to cut for him a hundred cords of wood, at twenty-five cents a cord and board. He could chop about two cords a day, and though the undertaking was somewhat formidable for a boy of his age, he kept at it resolutely until he had chopped the one hundred cords.

From a height near where he was working he obtained his first view of Lake Erie, and his slumbering fancy for the sea was fully aroused.

Thus was he educated, at the first, in the valuable school of poverty and "fierce struggle for existence."

"Poverty, self-denial and hardy toil meted out to him their severe discipline."

If the man of culture is "the man who has formed his ideals bor and self-denial," then, in this sense, better cultured. In this school were

no

formed his habits of application, of endurance, and of indomitable purpose."

In President Hinsdale's opinion, the familiar wood-chopping, canal-driving, and other stories, have a three-fold significance: "First, they reveal the nature of his early life; second, taken with his subsequent history, they show the power of the man; third, they teach that there is one country on the globe where a boy need not be born on the steps of the throne, or in the seats of wealth, to rise to a distinguished place; but that the best which America has to offer is within the reach of the poor boy's brain, and heart, and hand."

Accepting the above as a correct judgment, it is easily seen wherein the stories already related and others have their merit.

The story of a childhood passed in poverty, of intellect and moral nature trained in strenuous contests with adversity, is not unfamiliar to those who have read the lives of the men who have been successful in this country in any of the walks of life. It is one of the most beneficent results of American institutions, that we have ceased to speak of poverty and hardship, and the necessity for hard and humble toil, as disadvantages to a spirit endowed by nature with the capacity for generous ambitions. In a society where labor is honorable, and where every place in social or public life is open to merit, "early poverty is no more a disadvantage than a gymnasium to an athlete, or drill and discipline to a soldier."

General Garfield was never ashamed of his origin, and he never forgot the friends of his struggling childhood, youth, and manhood; and it might be added, they never forgot him. He

"Did not change, but kept in lofty place
The wisdom which adversity had bred."

One who knew him well has truly said: "The humblest friend of his boyhood was ever welcome to him, when he sat in the highest seats, where Honor was sitting by his side. The poorest laborer was sure of the sympathy of one who had known all the bitterness of want and the sweetness of bread earned by the sweat of the brow. He was ever the simple, plain, modest gentleman. When he met. a common soldier, it was not the general or the military hero that met him, but the comrade. When he met a scholar, it was not the learned man, or the college president, but the learner.

It was fitting that he who found open the road through every gradation of public honor, from the log cabin to the presidency, simply at the price of deserving it, should have answered in the same speech the sophistries of communism and the sinister forebodings of Lord Macaulay.

"Here," he said, "society is not fixed in horizontal layers, like the crust of the earth, but, as a great New England man said years ago, 'It is rather like the ocean, broad, deep, grand, open, and so free in all its parts, that every drop that mingles with the yellow sand at the bottom may ride through all the waters, till it gleams in the sunshine on the crest of the brightest waves.' So it is here in our free society, permeated with the light of American freedom. There is no American boy, however poor, however humble, orphan though he may be, that, if he have a clear head, a true heart, a strong arm, he may rise through all the grades of society, and become the crown, the glory, the pillar of the State. Here there is no need for the Old World war between capital and labor. Here is no need of the explosion of the social order predicted by Macaulay."

It is not, therefore, beneath the dignity of the grandest life to relate the incidents which belong to its childhood age, even if it does appear that these incidents are the

common heritage of thousands who never rise above the humblest stature. They are teachers, pointing toward a New World, and yet a world wherein the powers of manhood will be only the enlarging and strengthening of those faculties which were born with the child and grew into shapeliness even in the days of childhood. They contain the elements of a revelation which may be crowned at last in the vision of a man who was

"That tower of strength

Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew."

CHAPTER IV.

THE PERIOD OF CHANGE.

In the life of every human being there is change, and there are changes, and what may be called the "period of change." This period of change in the life of an individual man, or woman, is at the time when his own thought and reason dictate the choice that is made, instead of the leader whom he has heretofore followed, even though that leader is the honored parent or trusted friend. In other words, this period of change comes when the trend or bias of life begins to assert itself.

Just here is where the power of choice is exercised; and choice largely determines manhood. The greatest man is he who chooses the right with invincible resolution; who resists the sorest temptations from within and from without; who bears the heaviest burdens cheerfully; and whose reliance on truth, and virtue, and God, is most unfaltering.

The ability to choose is a wonderful gift, and the power of choice is an awful power, and the exercise of it depends not more, perhaps, on the nature of the individual, than on the teaching and training he has received. It is remarked by Dr. E. H. Sears, in his essay on "Choice," that, "The child, as soon as he can understand the words Right and Wrong, stands between the world of Light and