* * * * * The first epoch of his life is the great success, as his young friends thought it, when, before he was of age, he received an appointment as clerk in the War Department in Washington. It was then that he entered the "Civil Service," and became a "civil servant" of the United States. Why was he appointed? Why? Because there was nothing else for him to do. He had grown up shiftlessly, the oldest son of a widow, who had not a firm hand enough to keep him at school. He threw his Latin Grammar into the fire the day it was bought for him, and refused to go to college. One of his uncles offered him a farm at the West; but he did not choose to be a farmer: he said he thought he would rather be a gentleman. The same prejudice interfered with his being apprenticed to learn the printer's trade or the painter's or the carriage-builder's, or any of the other methods by which hand-laborers subdue the world; so an effort had been made, with a good deal of solicitation to back it, to put him into a wholesale importing house. But it turned out, the first day, that his figures were so dubious that no one could tell by his memoranda whether he had counted two hundred and fifteen bales of gunny cloth or 2,015. And when, on the second day, he gave to a teamster an order for two bundles of pine kindlings, which was so written and spelled that the next day one hundred bundles of pine shingles were found encumbering the stairway of the warehouse, and when this blunder was traced home to Master John's handwriting, he was notified that the firm of Picul, Sapan, & Company had no further need for his services. Then his much-enduring uncles, by much letter-writing and vigilant attendance at many congressional district conventions, got him nominated by their member of Congress to a cadetship at West Point. This gentleman was called _their member_ because they had _quoad hoc_ bought him by such services. But when Master John presented himself for examination at West Point, he was so uncertain whether eleven times eleven were a hundred and seven, or whether it were not a hundred and seventeen, that he was passed by, and a little Irish boy, named Phil Sheridan, who had no uncles that were ever heard of, was taken in his place. How much the country lost in that substitution can never be told. After a similar experience as to a midshipman's berth, Master John had been left to follow up his own views in the training for a gentleman. Sometimes, in terrible pinch for pocket-money, he would shovel sidewalks for the neighbors. He was always ready, in summer, to burn a good deal of powder in shooting beach-birds; but he had attained the age of twenty without the knowledge of any handicraft, mystery, or profession except that of catching flounders from the wharves of the seaport village where he lived.