Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Josephine Paolucci, Joshua Hutchinson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. [Illustration: JAMES A. GARFIELD, AT THE AGE OF 16. _Copied by permission of_ J.F. RYDER, _Cleveland, G._] FROM CANAL BOY TO PRESIDENT, OR THE BOYHOOD AND MANHOOD OF JAMES A. GARFIELD. BY HORATIO ALGER, JR., AUTHOR OF RAGGED DICK; LUCK AND PLUCK; TATTERED TOM, ETC. _ILLUSTRATED_. NEW YORK AMERICAN PUBLISHERS CORPORATION 310-318 SIXTH AVENUE 1881 TO HARRY AND JAMES GARFIELD WHOSE PRIVATE SORROW IS THE PUBLIC GRIEF, THIS MEMORIAL OF THEIR ILLUSTRIOUS FATHER Is inscribed WITH THE WARMEST SYMPATHY. GENERAL PREFACE. The present series of volumes has been undertaken with the view of supplying the want of a class of books for children, of a vigorous, manly tone, combined with a plain and concise mode of narration. The writings of Charles Dickens have been selected as the basis of the scheme, on account of the well-known excellence of his portrayal of children, and the interests connected with children--qualities which have given his volumes their strongest hold on the hearts of parents. These delineations having thus received the approval of readers of mature age, it seemed a worthy effort to make the young also participants in the enjoyment of these classic fictions, to introduce the children of real life to these beautiful children of the imagination. With this view, the career of Little Nell and her Grandfather, Oliver, Little Paul, Florence Dombey, Smike, and the Child-Wife, have been detached from the large mass of matter with which they were originally connected, and presented, in the author's own language, to a new class of readers, to whom the little volumes will we doubt not, be as attractive as the larger originals have so long proved to the general public. We have brought down these famous stories from the library to the nursery--the parlor table to the child's hands--having a precedent for the proceeding, if one be needed, in the somewhat similar work, the Tales from Shakespeare, by one of the choicest of English authors and most reverential of scholars, Charles Lamb. Newtonville, Mass. PREFACE. If I am asked why I add one to the numerous Lives of our dead President, I answer, in the words of Hon. Chauncey M. Depew, because "our annals afford no such incentive to youth as does his life, and it will become one of the Republic's household stories."