ung Cleveland was
taken into her home virtually as private secretary to her husband, Lewis
F. Allen, a man of means, culture, and public spirit. Allen occupied a
large house with spacious grounds in a suburb of the city, and owned a
farm on which he bred fine cattle. He issued the "American Short-Horn
Herd Book," a standard authority for pedigree stock, and the fifth
edition, published in 1861, made a public acknowledgment of "the
kindness, industry, and ability" with which Grover Cleveland had
assisted the editor "in correcting and arranging the pedigrees for
publication."

With his uncle's friendship to back him, Cleveland had, of course, no
difficulty in getting into a reputable law office as a student,
and thereafter his affairs moved steadily along the road by which
innumerable young Americans of diligence and industry have advanced
to success in the legal profession. Cleveland's career as a lawyer was
marked by those steady, solid gains in reputation which result from care
and thoroughness rather than from brilliancy, and in these respects
it finds many parallels among lawyers of the trustee type. What is
exceptional and peculiar in Cleveland's career is the way in which
political situations formed about him without any contrivance on his
part, and as it were projected him from office to office until he
arrived in the White House.

At the outset nothing could have seemed more unlikely than such a
career. Cleveland's ambitions were bound up in his profession and his
politics were opposed to those of the powers holding local control. But
the one circumstance did not shut him out of political vocation and
the other became a positive advantage. He entered public life in 1863
through an unsought appointment as assistant district attorney for Erie
County. The incumbent of the office was in poor health and needed an
assistant on whom he could rely to do the work. Hence Cleveland was
called into service. His actual occupancy of the position prompted his
party to nominate him to the office; and although he was defeated, he
received a vote so much above the normal voting strength of his party
that, in 1869, he was picked for the nomination to the office of sheriff
to strengthen a party ticket made up in the interest of a congressional
candidate. The expectation was that while the district might be carried
for the Democratic candidate for Congress, Cleveland would probably fail
of election. The nomination was virtually for