y, Ohio, in March, 1831, and there is no good reason to suppose
that he did not know. While so many of our soldiers were of Scotch-Irish
origin, he was simply of Irish origin, and his father and mother were
poor Irish laboring people, Catholics in religion, and careful to rear
their son in their faith. Many stories are told of his boyhood, which
seems to have been like that of most other Ohio boys of his generation.
The most significant of these stories are those relating to his childish
love and knowledge of horses and horsemanship; for they seem the
prophecy of the greatest cavalry commander of modern times, who
invented that branch of the service anew, as Gilmore reinvented gunnery.
Sheridan's first famous ride was on a barebacked, bridleless horse which
he mounted in the pasture where it was feeding, and clung to with his
knees and elbows in its long flight down the highway. No poet has yet
put this legendary feat into verse, but all my readers know the poem
which celebrates Sheridan's ride from Winchester to Cedar Creek. This
ride not only saved the day, but it stamped with the fiery little
man's character the history of the whole campaign in the Valley of the
Shenandoah; and in it, as it were, he met Sherman halfway on his
March to the Sea, and completed the deadly circuit in which the great
rebellion died.

[Illustration: General Phillip H. Sheridan 262R]

Of all our commanders he was perhaps the best beloved by his men, for
he fought with his men. He tried to account for their liking him on no
other ground. He once said, "These men all know that where it is the
hottest there I am, and they like it, and that is the reason they like
me." He was in the hottest place because he thought it was his duty to
be there, and not because he was fearless. "The man who says he isn't
afraid under fire, is a liar. I am afraid," he frankly said, with a
touch of that profanity which Grant never used, "and if I followed my
own impulse I should turn and get out. It is all a question of the power
of mind over body."

As a boy he had some schooling at a Catholic school, under an eccentric
Irish master whom he used to play tricks upon, and who used to thrash
him impartially with the rest. When he left school, he became a clerk in
a hardware store in his native village, and then in a dry-goods store.
From the last place, he was appointed in 1848 to West Point and his
destiny was fixed. In his class was another Ohio boy, born not far