He was a reader at all times. And one of the books that made an indelible impression upon him was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” It came in his most impressionable years, and did much to fill his soul with a hatred of human slavery—did much to prepare him for the services of those later years, when he seconded to the limit of his powers the work of the Great Liberator. He had followed the fortunes of Uncle Tom and of Eliza, and regarded them as types. And he was quite certain the horrors of human slavery were fairly depicted in the story. Among the few but excellent books in his father’s possession was one called “Noble Deeds of American Women;” and the reading of it in that period of his youth impressed upon him vividly the struggles and sacrifices of the maids and matrons of the earlier day. The book had not many companions, for libraries were not large in those days; and it will be remembered that the house where William McKinley’s boyhood was spent was the home of a workingman. It was a foreman of workingmen, to be sure, and one who had from time to time an interest in the modest business which he conducted. But yet it was a home where actual toil was by no means unknown; where the mother was the housekeeper, performing with her own hands much of the domestic labor, and where not one of the family was brought up with a contempt for industry. In those years of transition from boyhood to youth, young William McKinley passed through a period of ill health. It interfered a good deal with his labors at home, and was the cause of cutting short his attendance at the college in Alexandria. It is by no means an unusual phase of a young man’s life, and it vanished as he advanced to the years of maturity. Throughout his life, with that exception, he has been a healthy person; and the season of delicate health at the threshold of manhood left no harmful consequences. In 1896, when one of the enterprising publishers was hurrying to issue a “Campaign Life of William McKinley,” he sent a writer into Mahoning and Stark counties, and elsewhere throughout that portion of the Buckeye State, with instructions to find some record of the boyish escapades of young William. The writer found a number of men who had known the nominee in his boyhood, and asked one of them: “Was he never in mischief—like robbing orchards, or stealing watermelons, or carrying away gates on ‘Hallowe’en?’” The old man thought for a moment, apparently passed the lad’s life in review before the judge that abided in his memory, and then he said: “I don’t remember that William was ever in any scrape of any kind.” Then he waited for a moment, filled his pipe, lighted it reflectively and added as he pinched out the flame before throwing the match away: “And if I did I wouldn’t tell it.”