Napoleon’s home was the rugged island of Corsica. While he was still a little boy, he found, between some rocks, near the shore, a cave which he claimed for his own. This is still pointed out to thousands who come to visit the boy’s birthplace, as “Napoleon’s Grotto.” At that time there was a feud between the boys of the town and the shepherd lads on the hills around. Little Napoleon told the other town boys that if they would do as he said, he would make those big country boys stop throwing stones at them whenever they met. The town lads agreed to this; so Napoleon told them to gather stones and pile them in a row a little distance below the fortress which the shepherds had chosen behind some rocks on top of their hill. The pale Bonaparte boy led his young army up till the country youths fired a volley of stones at them. Then he turned and ran down the hill followed by his company. The enemy came out and gave chase, pell-mell. This was just what Napoleon expected. When the little leader got down to the piles of stones he shouted--_“Halt!”_ His soldiers obeyed. _“Stones!”_ Each boy gathered up as many as he could carry. “_About face!_--FIRE!” Before the astonished shepherds could stop they were met by a shower of rocks. The big fellows broke and scattered in all directions, and two of them were taken prisoner. Captain Bonaparte would not let them go till the other country boys pledged themselves not to touch his “men” again. Thus eight-year-old Napoleon became the leader of the boys in his home town. Before he was ten, he was sent to a military school in France, where sons of noblemen were educated. Some of those French boys were wayward, mean, and savagely cruel. They made fun of the shy country lad, for his rough Corsican ways and speech, and because he was small and sallow. Napoleon had entered the school on a scholarship, so they sneered at him as “the charity boy.” He could not speak French at first, and pronounced his own name so that it sounded like the French words for “Nose of straw.” As Napoleon’s nose was long, straight, and thin, they laughed and shouted his nickname, “Mr. Straw Nose!” All this made the proud, sensitive lad speechless with rage. He kept himself away from the rest. A garden plot was assigned for each cadet to tend. A few of the others were too idle to take care of theirs, so they gave them to Napoleon and he kept them in order as his own. In the center of his little kingdom he built an arbor where he could stay alone to study and plan as he had done in his little cave in Corsica, and woe to those who entered there without his permission. He had suffered this sort of life nearly four years before his father and mother managed to visit their boy, who was almost a prisoner in military school. Napoleon wrote of the shock the visit gave his mother: