The lad of nine attended the village schools till he was sixteen, when, through the influence of Mr. Ewing, he entered the Military Academy at West Point. He had no love for warlike pursuits, but looked forward to becoming a civil engineer in the far West. He had all along cared for history, travel, and fiction, but never especially for battles. He enjoyed out-door sports, and long rambles with rod and gun. He studied well while at West Point, standing high in drawing, chemistry, mathematics, and philosophy, reaching the sixth place in a class of forty-three at his graduation in 1840. He was never fond of display, and had no relish for the minutiæ of dress and drill. "Men who have successfully conducted great campaigns, and fought great battles, have not," says Mr. Smalley, "as a rule, taken much interest in the polishing of buttons, or the exact alignment of a company of troops." Soon after graduating, young Sherman, tall, slender, with auburn hair and hazel eyes, a second lieutenant in the Third Artillery, was sent to Florida to keep in check the Seminole Indians. After two winters he was transferred to Fort Moultrie, near Charleston, South Carolina, as first lieutenant, where he remained for four years. Here he enjoyed Southern hospitality, and learned the character of the people and the topography of the country, both here and in Georgia. More than twenty years later, this knowledge was invaluable when he fought his battles at Atlanta and made his immortal March to the Sea. War with Mexico was threatening; and in 1846 Sherman was sent to New York, and afterwards to Ohio, as a recruiting officer. When he heard of the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, May 8 and 9, he was eager to be at the front: recruiting, as he says in his memoirs, while "his comrades were actually fighting, was intolerable." He was soon ordered to California, which his company reached, after a voyage of nearly two hundred days, by way of Cape Horn. At Rio Janeiro, "the beauty of whose perfect harbor words will not describe," they remained for a week, and the young Ohio officer enjoyed the delights of travel. He saw Dom Pedro and his Empress, the daughter of Louis Philippe of France, the Palace, the Botanic Gardens, the Emperor's coffee plantation, where the coffee-tree reminded him of "the red haw-tree of Ohio; and the berries were somewhat like those of the same tree, two grains of coffee being enclosed in one berry." At Cape Horn, "an island rounded like an oven, after which it takes its name (_ornos_, oven)," they were followed by Cape-pigeons and albatrosses of every color. At Valparaiso they remained ten days, and enjoyed large strawberries in November. The last of January, 1847, they entered Monterey Bay, and saw live-oaks and low adobe houses, with red-tiled roofs, amid dark pine-trees.