The nature which was in him began to express itself from the earliest years. In his school-days he was anything but the shy, retiring child which would be the father of such a man as our critic described; and his love and yearning for companionship and the expression of affection come out in almost every one of his juvenile letters. It is so seldom that a boy’s letters really express the boy’s life that one does not feel that they have any permanent interest. But the boy Gibson wrote letters which deserve to be preserved. They are as quaint as if they were fictitious. They could not have been truer to life if they had been made out of whole cloth. It would be hard to match the following, written when he was twelve years old, from the “Gunnery”; its quaint and naïve boyishness is delicious: “WASHINGTON, _March 1, 1863_. “DEAR MOTHER: “I received your letter for the first in three weeks and was as happy as a king and I am now. you may expect a letter from me every week. “Only till the latter part of this month before the Exhibition, and then comes vacation which I long for very much. Every Friday the boys act a drama; the last one was ‘Love in ’76,’ and it was perfectly splendid and the one before that was ‘Romance under Difficulties,’ and that was better than the last. I wish you could send me up some small dramas because I would like to read them. “The principal thing among the boys is catching mice with little box traps, (like the one that Grandpa made two or three summers ago) which we make ourselves. One of the boys took some hoopskirt and made a cage to keep his mice in and I made two and have got four traps. The boy that made the first trap made the first cage and he is a very ingenious boy his name is Charley Howard he is a nice boy and is liked throughout this whole great institution as well as the other boys too. “It is a very unpleasant day first in the morning it snowed and next it rained and now it is snowing again and looks as if it would snow a long while it is dark dismal and foggy. “I am very sorry that Cotty has so many boils, because I can imagine how they feel but you must tell him he must try to be as patient as Job if he can. The other evening I touched the tip end of my nose to the stove pipe the stove pipe being hot burnt the tip of my nose off so now everywhere I go I am laughed at. It don’t hurt me any to be laughed at if they leave my nose alone that is all I ask. “The other day I was sliding out in the grove on the ice and I slipped and fell and struck on my sore knee and now it cracks just like it did first, only it don’t hurt me so much, but I guess I will get over it before long. I am known in this school by the name of Fatty and Pussy and am so used to it that I take it as my own name.