his
blithe and dauntless spirit felt the stress of want. But he began to
help himself and school himself, as the children of the poor must and
do, and he early showed a passion for literature and adventure; he
wanted to read; he wanted to go to sea; he actually tried to ship on
a schooner at Cleveland, but, failing this, he got a chance to drive
a canal-boat team. He fell sick and came home, and when he got well he
learned carpentering. With his earnings in that trade he helped himself
through the Academy at Chardon in Geauga County. From there he went
to Hiram College, in Portage County, and then to Williams College, in
Massachusetts. He studied law, and was elected to the Ohio Senate, which
he left to enter the army. He was a brave and able soldier, and rose
from lieutenant to be major general, before he left the service of his
country in the field, to serve her in Congress. After sixteen years
in the House, his state sent him to the Senate, and then his
fellow-citizens chose him their President. He had been only four months
in the White House, when the wretched Guiteau, a fool maddened by his
own vanity and the sight of others' malevolence toward the man who
never hated any one, shot him down; and he lingered amidst the fervent
sympathy of the whole world, till he died nine or ten weeks later. Of
all the great Ohioans he was the gentlest and kindest nature; he never
did harm to any man, and his heart was as high as his aspiring intellect
above anything base or low. His ambition was in all things for what was
fine and noble.

Quincy Adams Gilmore, who was born on a farm in Lorain County in 1825,
was graduated at the head of his class from West Point. He achieved
lasting fame in the siege of Fort Pulaski in Georgia, which other
engineers had said could never be taken. Gilmore reduced it in two days
by a feat in gunnery which changed forever the science and practice of
that branch of the military art. In the ooze of a trembling marsh, which
scarcely lifted its uncertain surface above the tides, he planted his
heavy rifled cannon at three times the distance that siege artillery was
believed effective, and battered down the walls of the fort with perfect
ease, and with the loss of only one life in his command.

The doubt as to the birthplace of Philip H. Sheridan, with a choice
between Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio, seems not to have been felt
by Sheridan himself. He decided that he was born in Somerset, Perry
Count