The
soldiering side did not appeal to him, but the school side did.

"I wouldn't stay in the army," he remarked to a friend. "There won't
be a gun fired in the world for a hundred years, I guess. If there
isn't, I'll study law, but I want an education, and now I see how I can
get it."

His mother was by no means "sold" on the idea of his becoming a soldier
either, and it was only when he assured her that there wouldn't be a
gun fired in a hundred years, that she finally consented. If she could
have looked ahead to his future career, and final part in the greatest
war the world has ever known--one wonders what her emotions would have
been!

Pershing passed his entrance examination by a narrow margin, and then
entered a training school at Highland Falls, N. Y., for tutoring in
certain deficient branches. At last in June, 1882, when he was just
rounding his twenty-second year, he became a freshman in the great
Academy on the Hudson.

The young plebe from the West speedily fell in love with the
institution and all that it represented. He found the soldier life
awakening in him, along with his desire for a good education. Four
happy years were spent there--and while he didn't shine, being number
thirty in a class of seventy-seven, his all-around qualities made him
many friends among both faculty and students. He was made ranking
cadet captain in his senior year, and chosen class president.

Twenty-five years later, writing from clear around the world, at
Manila, to his class, at a reunion, he gives a long, breezy account of
his experience there, from which we have space to quote only a few
sentences:

"This brings up a period of West Point life whose vivid impressions
will be the last to fade. Marching into camp, piling bedding, policing
company streets for logs or wood carelessly dropped by upper classmen,
pillow fights at tattoo with Marcus Miller, sabre drawn, marching up
and down superintending the plebe class, policing up feathers from the
general parade; light artillery drills, double-timing around old Fort
Clinton at morning squad drill; Wiley Bean and the sad fate of his
seersucker coat; midnight dragging, and the whole summer full of events
can only be mentioned in passing.

"No one can ever forget his first guard tour with all its preparation
and perspiration. I got along all right during the day, but at night
on the color line my troubles began. Of course, I was scared beyond
the point of prop