There is a sort of _unexpectedness_ about Grant, which he began to develop as a boy. He does just what the beholder does not anticipate, surprises by sticking to anything, when, according to ordinary rules, one ought to give up, or confounds by a course of action hitherto unheard of. He holds on to the pony when he ought to be thrown; he comes home with a load of logs when he ought to have come home empty; he accomplishes many a feat in which he ought to have failed, according to the every-day rules of life. He was fond of playing marbles, which seems to be the only strictly boys' amusement in which he indulged. He bet half a dozen marbles with a school-mate that he would jump twenty-five feet at a single leap, selecting his own ground for the feat. If I had been there, I should have taken that bet, for it seemed as impossible for a little fellow like him to do it, as it did to capture Vicksburg. Grant went to a perpendicular bluff, having the requisite height, and jumped down at one leap,--for if the terms of the wager had required it, it would hardly have been convenient to make two leaps of it. Though he went down to his middle in the mud below, he won the bet. Doubtless he came out of the slough rather the worse for the leap, so far as personal appearance was concerned, but his plight only assures us that he looked before he leaped, as he always did, for hard pan, or a solid rock, might have been trying even to his nerves, in a jump of twenty-five feet. In my opinion Lee was as much astonished to see Grant on the south side of Richmond as the boy with whom he made the bet was to see him jump perpendicularly instead of horizontally. CHAPTER IV. _Wherein Captain Galligasken follows the illustrious Soldier to West Point, and dilates admiringly upon the many excellent Traits of Character which the Hero exhibited there._ Tanning, even with oak bark, and the strong stimulus of the paternal example, had no charms to young Grant. Though it was a very honorable and useful occupation, he was remorselessly opposed to it; not because he was a dandy, and it soiled his hands, nor because he was fastidious, and the odor was unpleasant, but because he had no taste for the trade. It presented nothing but the dull routine of a mechanical employment, with no difficulties to be overcome, and with no variety to enliven it. Whenever his father suggested that they should grind bark, he would start for the village without a word of reply, and hire a boy to take his place in the tannery, while he earned the money to pay him in some more congenial way.