Four years of struggling had not paid pecuniarily. Poverty is not a pleasant school in which to be nurtured. Blessings upon those who do not grow harsh or discontented with its bitter lessons. To keep sunshine in the face when want knocks at the heart is to win the victory in a dreadful battle. And yet many are able to accomplish this, and brighten with their happy faces lives more prosperous than their own. In the winter of 1858 Captain Grant established a partnership with a cousin of his wife in the real estate business. Again separation came. The little family were left on the farm while the father tried another method of earning a living for them. "Our business," he says, "might have become prosperous if I had been able to wait for it to grow. As it was, there was no more than one person could attend to, and not enough to support two families. While a citizen of St. Louis, and engaged in the real estate agency business, I was a candidate for the office of county engineer, an office of respectability and emolument which would have been very acceptable to me at that time. The incumbent was appointed by the county court, which consisted of five members. My opponent had the advantage of birth over me (he was a citizen by adoption), and carried off the prize. I now withdrew from the co-partnership with Boggs, and, in May, 1860, removed to Galena, Illinois, and took a clerkship in my father's store." He was once more in the tannery business, which he had so hated when a boy. It is well that men and women are spurred to duty because somebody depends upon them for daily food, otherwise this life of often uncongenial labor would be unbearable. We rarely do what we like to do in this world;--we do what the merciless goad of circumstance forces us to do. He is wise who goes to his work with a smile. The year 1860 opened upon a new era in this country. Slavery and anti-slavery had struggled together till the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency told that the decisive hour had come. The nation could no longer exist "half slave and half free." When Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated, March 4, 1861, the Southern States seceded, one after another, until eleven had separated from the Union. Most of the Southern forts were already in the hands of the Confederates. Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, still remained under the control of the Union. While besieged by the South, an effort was made to send supplies to our starving garrison. The fort was fired upon April 11, 1861, and that shot, like the one at Concord, was "heard round the world."