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the birthplace of Ulysses Simpson Grant, one of the greatest captains of
all time, one of the purest patriots, one of the best and gentlest men.
I need not speak of his career as a soldier, for that has become a part
of the nation's history. The beginnings of his life were rude and hard;
it was afterwards often clouded with failure; it brightened out into
such splendid success as few lives have ever known; it was again
darkened by trouble and disaster, and it closed in a long anguish of
suffering. But if ever a life was worth living it was his, and his
memory is safe forever in the love of his country and the honor of the
world.

His parents removed soon after he was born to Brown County, where
Georgetown was his home until he was sent to West Point at seventeen.
His whole boyhood, therefore, was spent in Southwestern Ohio, where a
boy may live the happiest life on earth, and where Grant played, worked,
planned, and studied not only without a dream of the place he was to
take in history, but without special thought or liking for the calling
in which he was to stand with Caesar and with Napoleon.

When he was eight years old, he began to work in his father's tannery,
where he drove the horse that turned the bark mill, and broke the bark
into the hopper. He did not like the work, and he escaped from it when
he could, and did jobs of wagoning about the village. He loved his
horses and kept them sleek and fat; and it is told of him that when
he first traded horses he was so eager to get a certain colt that he
offered the man even more than he asked. He was fond of all boyish
sports, but he was never rough, or profane, or foul-mouthed, and he was
noted among his mates for his truth and honesty. The girls liked him for
his gentleness, the younger children for his kindness; he never teased
them, and he never tormented any living creature. There may have been
better boys, but I have never heard of them; and if Grant passed only
his first seventeen years in his native state, they were years of as
true a greatness relatively as any that followed. From the first he
was self-reliant, and taught himself to trust to his own powers and
resources. When seven years old, he got an unbroken colt from the stable
in his father's absence, hitched it to a sled which he loaded with wood
in the forest, and then drove home with a single line. He once wished
to ride his father's pacer on an errand he was sent upon; but his father
could not sp