father,
ambitious for his boy's education, sent for him and placed him at the
Academy in Clinton, where he was to be fitted to enter Hamilton College
in due time. But this larger opportunity he was not to enjoy. His father
received a call to take charge of a church at Holland Patent, a village
near Utica, N. Y., and the whole family left their home in Clinton for
this place; but only three weeks after their arrival the father died,
October 1, 1853, and the wife, with so many of the children as still
remained at home, were left to support life as their scanty means
enabled them. The mother, evidently a woman of much force of character,
remained on the rock where the waves of changing fortune last flung her,
and by her own efforts and the willing hands of her children, kept the
family together until, her loving duty done by all that remained to her,
she died in 1882, living happily long enough to see the beginning of her
high hope for her son Grover, fulfilled in his honorable career as Mayor
of Buffalo.

Grover Cleveland was now to exchange for a short time the quiet life of
a country village for the more stirring experience of life in a great
city. His brother William, after leaving Hamilton College, had obtained
employment as an instructor in the Institution for the Blind in New York
City, where he was the principal of the male teachers. After the death
of his father, he secured for his brother Grover the place of
book-keeper and assistant to the superintendent of the asylum. The boy
came to his new place, not only with the good character given him by his
brother, then as now a man much respected by his associates, but with
the good word of all with whom he had been connected, whether as
school-boy or as work-boy.

Grover Cleveland left New York in the autumn of 1854, at the end of his
year's engagement at the Institution for the Blind. He returned to his
mother's home for a brief visit, and then, with the hope of making a
beginning in the profession of the law, which he for some time intended
to take up, he visited some of the towns where his family was known,
Syracuse and Utica, in the hope of finding employment; but as no opening
presented itself, he determined to visit Cleveland, a town named for one
of his family. He stopped on his way at Buffalo, to visit an uncle,
Lewis F. Allen, a well-known farmer, who published each year a
compilation made by himself: "The American Short-Horn Herd-Book."
Pleased with his y