His parents removed soon after he was born to Brown County, where Georgetown was his home until he was sent to West Point at seventeen. His whole boyhood, therefore, was spent in Southwestern Ohio, where a boy may live the happiest life on earth, and where Grant played, worked, planned, and studied not only without a dream of the place he was to take in history, but without special thought or liking for the calling in which he was to stand with Caesar and with Napoleon. When he was eight years old, he began to work in his father’s tannery, where he drove the horse that turned the bark mill, and broke the bark into the hopper. He did not like the work, and he escaped from it when he could, and did jobs of wagoning about the village. He loved his horses and kept them sleek and fat; and it is told of him that when he first traded horses he was so eager to get a certain colt that he offered the man even more than he asked. He was fond of all boyish sports, but he was never rough, or profane, or foul-mouthed, and he was noted among his mates for his truth and honesty. The girls liked him for his gentleness, the younger children for his kindness; he never teased them, and he never tormented any living creature. There may have been better boys, but I have never heard of them; and if Grant passed only his first seventeen years in his native state, they were years of as true a greatness relatively as any that followed. From the first he was self-reliant, and taught himself to trust to his own powers and resources. When seven years old, he got an unbroken colt from the stable in his father’s absence, hitched it to a sled which he loaded with wood in the forest, and then drove home with a single line. He once wished to ride his father’s pacer on an errand he was sent upon; but his father could not spare it and the boy took his colt. “I will break him to pace,” he said, and he came back with the colt pacing. At twelve he hauled logs with a heavy draft team. Once the men who were to load for him did not come, and Grant managed with the help of a fallen tree to get the logs on the truck alone and drove home with them. After eleven he had scarcely any schooling except that of hard work, until he was appointed to West Point. From Georgetown, another Ohioan famous in the great war was sent about the same time to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. This was the boy Daniel Am-men, who was destined to become Admiral Ammen. He had saved Grant’s life when they were bathing together in White Oak Creek, and Grant remembered him with his high office and title when he became President. But Ammen had won both by his services during the war, for the Ammens were fighters. The admiral’s brother Jacob had early distinguished himself by gallantry that won him a generalship. Long before this their father had begun the good fight by printing John Rankin’s letters against slavery in his newspaper at Ripley.