yet in his strong, manly arms he carried her out to the family coach, when she was well enough to go for a drive. No mother ever had more reason to be proud of her tall, handsome son than the widow of Henry Lee. Feeling that his mother could not afford to send him to college, young Robert studied hard to enter West Point Military Academy. Because the country was still new and settlers had to defend their homes and lives from Indians, and also because the nations were always at war, such boys as George Washington and Robert Lee said to themselves, “When I’m a man I’ll be a soldier.” When Robert was eighteen he became a West Point cadet. After he left home his brave little mother exclaimed, “How _can_ I do without Robert? He is both son and daughter to me!” Cadet Lee’s life was without doubt the bravest any young man ever led at West Point. Young Jefferson Davis, who was there at the same time, fell off a cliff and nearly lost his life while breaking the rules of the Academy. Young Ulysses Grant wrote home ten years later that it was impossible to get through at West Point without demerits. But Robert E. Lee went through the whole four years without a single “black mark”! More than this, he did [Illustration: LEE’S INVASION OF THE NORTH. _From the painting by J. Steeple Davis, © 1897, by The Woolfall Co_] not drink, though young gentlemen of that day thought the serving of wine necessary in polite society. He did not even smoke. It was a wonder that the other cadets did not hate a young man who seemed to feel that he must behave better than the rest of them. What kept them all from calling him a “goody-goody boy,” a snob or a prig? It was the love of his kind heart, which they could see shining through his strange courage. Robert Lee fully realized that he had come to West Point to learn, at his country’s expense, how to be a soldier, and that the first duty of a soldier is to obey. If he had left his post and sneaked off the Academy grounds to drink, or gamble, or break some other rule, he would have been a deserter who, in real army life, would have deserved to be shot. But he never acted as if he felt above the rest, and so his fellow cadets did not sneer at Robert E. Lee. One of them said of him afterward: “He was the only one of all the men I have known who could laugh at the faults and follies of others without losing their affection.” At graduation, Lieutenant Lee was the most popular man at West Point; he ranked second in his class, and received the highest military honor in the course.