Warren Gamaliel Harding was born on a farm just outside the little town of Blooming Grove, Morrow County, Ohio, on November 2, 1865. He was the first child of eight, born to a country doctor, George Tryon Harding, and Phœbe Dickerson Harding. To his parents he was, of course, a prodigy; and his mother, deeply religious, supplied his middle name, Gamaliel--which in Hebrew means “God is a reward”--from the Bible, and in her heart settled upon his future in the ministry, in the Baptist faith. Typically and wholly Colonial, the ancestors of President Harding were Puritans and Pilgrims who came to wrest freedom and livelihood from an unbroken wilderness and played their part through the generations as pioneers, soldiers, and patriots. Dr. George T. Harding, his father, was a Civil War Veteran. Warren G. Harding’s boyhood was spent upon a forest-bordered farm, and, like most country boys, his time was filled with a routine of work and chores that never failed and seldom varied. He chopped down trees, split rails and firewood, dug post holes, built fences, planted and hoed corn and other crops, and tended stock and painted barns and farmhouses. One season, it is said, he left a crimson trail all through Morrow County in the barns he tinted a vermilion hue. This barn painting was done with extra zeal, as the money was to take him to college. In the strenuous days of his farming, chores, and general utility work, in the school of poverty that has turned out so many of our great men, who in such environment learned the industry and the mastery of detail along with the dignity of labour, that made them grasp opportunity with both hands and braced feet, Warren G. Harding laid the foundation for all later successes. A little knowledge of the printer’s trade, learned during his college career as editor of the college paper, fired the boy with a desire for more, and soon he handled odd jobs at the town printing office, later becoming a practical pressman and a “make-up” man. Seventeen found him the dignified teacher of the district school and an energetic member of the town band. [Illustration: _Photo. of Mrs. Harding (upper right corner) by Clinedinst Studio, Washington, D. C._ THE BODY OF WARREN G. HARDING Lying in State in the East Room of The White House] In 1884, his father, Dr. Harding, pulled up stakes and moved his family and chattels into the little town of Marion, the county seat of the adjoining county, then of about four thousand population. But the eldest son did not join the family for several months. When he came, at the age of nineteen, barefoot and astride an old white mule, his advent into the city that he was destined to put upon the map in later years furnished the material for one of the stories he enjoyed telling upon himself. “My father moved to Marion, from a farm near Caledonia, the winter before I came,” he used to relate.