"The farmer got down and John stripped off his coat. He was only a boy of seventeen or eighteen and slender, but he thrashed the old farmer soundly. And I have hated red sideburns ever since." After several terms of country school teaching, young Pershing saved up enough money to enter the State Normal School, at Kirksville, Mo. One of his sisters went with him. He remained there for two terms, doing his usual good steady work, but was still dissatisfied. He wanted to get a better education. About this time he happened to notice an announcement of a competitive examination in his district for an entrance to West Point. The soldiering side did not appeal to him, but the school side did. "I wouldn't stay in the army," he remarked to a friend. "There won't be a gun fired in the world for a hundred years, I guess. If there isn't, I'll study law, but I want an education, and now I see how I can get it." His mother was by no means "sold" on the idea of his becoming a soldier either, and it was only when he assured her that there wouldn't be a gun fired in a hundred years, that she finally consented. If she could have looked ahead to his future career, and final part in the greatest war the world has ever known--one wonders what her emotions would have been! Pershing passed his entrance examination by a narrow margin, and then entered a training school at Highland Falls, N. Y., for tutoring in certain deficient branches. At last in June, 1882, when he was just rounding his twenty-second year, he became a freshman in the great Academy on the Hudson. The young plebe from the West speedily fell in love with the institution and all that it represented. He found the soldier life awakening in him, along with his desire for a good education. Four happy years were spent there--and while he didn't shine, being number thirty in a class of seventy-seven, his all-around qualities made him many friends among both faculty and students. He was made ranking cadet captain in his senior year, and chosen class president. Twenty-five years later, writing from clear around the world, at Manila, to his class, at a reunion, he gives a long, breezy account of his experience there, from which we have space to quote only a few sentences: "This brings up a period of West Point life whose vivid impressions will be the last to fade. Marching into camp, piling bedding, policing company streets for logs or wood carelessly dropped by upper classmen, pillow fights at tattoo with Marcus Miller, sabre drawn, marching up and down superintending the plebe class, policing up feathers from the general parade; light artillery drills, double-timing around old Fort Clinton at morning squad drill; Wiley Bean and the sad fate of his seersucker coat; midnight dragging, and the whole summer full of events can only be mentioned in passing.