"His experience upon the canal was a severe one, but perhaps useful. I can remember the winter when he came home after the summer's service there. He had the chills all that fall and winter, yet he would shake, and get his lessons at home; go over to the school and recite, and thus keep up with his class. The next spring found him weak from constant ague. Yet he intended to return to the canal. Here came the turning point in his life. Mr. Bates, who taught the school, pleaded with him not to do so, and said that, if he would continue in school until the next fall, he could get a certificate. I received my certificate about the same time. The next year we went to the seminary at Chester, only twelve miles distant. Here our books were furnished us, and we cooked our own victuals. We lived upon a dollar a week each. Our diet was strong, but very plain; mush and molasses, pork and potatoes. Saturdays we took our axes and went into the woods and cut cordwood; during vacations we labored in the harvest field, or taught a district school, as we could. Yonder," said he, pointing off toward a beautiful valley, "about two miles distant stands the school-house where Garfield first taught school. He got twelve dollars a month and boarded around. I also taught school in a neighboring town. You see," continued the farmer, "that the general and myself were very close to one another from the time either of us could lisp until he became President. He visited me here just before election, and looked with gratification upon that pole yonder and its flag, erected by his neighbors and kinsmen. He wandered over the fields he himself had helped clear, and pointed out to me trees, from the limbs of which he had shot squirrel after squirrel, and beneath the branches of which he had played and worked in the years of his infancy and boyhood. "I forgot to say that one of General Garfield's striking characteristics while he was growing up was that, when he saw a boy in the class excel him in anything, he never gave up until he reached the same standard, and even went beyond it. It got to be known that no scholar could be ahead of him. Our association as men has been almost as close as that of boys, although not as constant. The general never forgot his neighbors or less fortunate kinsmen, and often visited us, as we did him.