f the high and kindly personal character common to them.

[Illustration: General George A. Custer 258R]

George A. Custer put into his life of vivid action the splendor of
romance. His figure stands foremost in any picture of the war as that of
the most dashing and daring cavalier of his time; but if his bearing was
that of a young hero of fiction, his deeds were those of an accomplished
and disciplined modern soldier. He was born at New Rumley in Harrison
County, of a Hessian ancestor who had come over to fight for King
George against the country which Custer lived and died to serve, and
he inherited from him the blue German eyes, and the yellow German hair
which he loved to wear long, and flying about his neck in his gallant
charges. But otherwise he was of the simple matter-of-fact Ohio
character. He got himself sent to West Point by means of a letter which
he wrote to the congressman of his district. He frankly owned himself "a
Democrat boy," and though the congressman was a Republican his fancy was
taken with the honesty of the youth, whom he never saw till one day a
young officer "with long yellow hair, hanging like Absalom's," presented
himself at his house in Washington as Lieutenant Custer. "Mr. Bingham,
I've been in my first battle," he said, "and I've come to tell you I've
tried not to show the coward." After that, in numberless bold forays
and fierce battles, he displayed such dauntless bravery, such brilliant
prowess, that General Sheridan, in sending Mrs. Custer the table on
which Lee signed his surrender, could write, "I know of no person more
instrumental in bringing about this desirable event than your own most
gallant husband." All the world knows how this glorious hero fell in the
West, long after the war, before an overwhelming force of Indians.

[Illustration: James A. Garfield 259L]

If Custer was the romance of our history, James A. Garfield was its
tragedy, the sort of noble tragedy which exalts while it awes. Again we
have in his life the story, so often told in the Ohio annals, of early
struggles with poverty, and of triumph over unfriendly fate. The child
who was born in the rude farmhouse in Orange, Cuyahoga County, in 1831,
was of Puritan lineage on his father's side and Huguenot blood on
his mother's; and throughout his life he showed the qualities of both
strains. He was left the youngest of four children to the care of his
widowed mother, soon after his birth, and at the very beginning