Young, aspiring, and ambitious, he was not long in making friends, and among them a beautiful girl evinced her appreciation of his character, by becoming his wife. Eliza McCardle was the only daughter of a widow, whose father had been dead many years, and whose life had been spent in her mountain home. When she was married, she had just reached her seventeenth year, and her husband was not yet twenty-one. Education in those days did not comprehend and embrace the scientific accomplishments it does now, but a naturally gifted mind, endowed with much common sense, received a broad basis for future development. She was well versed in the usual branches of instruction, and possessed, in an extraordinary degree, that beauty of face and form which rendered her mother one of the most beautiful of women. [Illustration: MRS. ANDREW JOHNSON. ] It is a mistaken idea that she taught her husband his letters; for in the dim shadows of the workshop at Raleigh, after the toil of the day was complete, he had mastered the alphabet and made himself generally acquainted with the construction of words and sentences. The incentive to acquire mental attainment was certainly enhanced when he felt the superiority of her acquirements, and from that time his heroic nature began to discover itself. In the silent watches of the night, while sleep rested upon the village, the youthful couple studied together; she ofttimes reading as he completed the weary task before him, oftener still bending over him to guide his hand in writing. He never had the benefit of one day’s school routine in his life, yet he acquired by perseverance the benefits denied by poverty. What a contemplation it must have been to those mothers who watched over their children as they struggled together! Let time in its flight transport us back to those years, and see what a scene was being then enacted there. In that obscure village in the mountains, three strong, yet tender-hearted women watched over and cherished the budding genius of the future statesman. History, in preserving its record of the life and services of the seventeenth President of the United States, rears to them a noble tribute of their faithfulness. The young wife, thrifty and industrious all day, worked patiently and hopefully as night brought her pupil again to his studies, and punctually completed her womanly duties that she might be ready for the never-varying rule of their lives. Much of latent powers he owed to her indefatigable zeal and encouragement, and he never forgot those evening hours years ago when the scintillations of natural genius first began to dawn, which ultimately converted the tailor boy into the Senator, and subsequently into the President of his country. Year after year she watched him as he rose step by step, and always as willing and earnest as when in life’s bright morn they were married.