T is not great talents alone, nor favoring circumstances, which make men distinguished, but usually a combination of both. Many great minds pass through life. in obscurity; much inestimable worth is known only to a few.

"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

There are vast amounts of unknown talent and unappreciated worth in all human society. In the dull mediocrity of common life there is much human gold, and not a few jewels of rarest water. Most men are under-valued. Most men under-value themselves. If men everywhere knew what they could be and do, and would put forth their best efforts constantly, we should live in the society of the noble and great. Nothing is so much against us as our disheartening estimate of ourselves.

The common saying that circumstances make men is only half true. Men can be great, in truth, with circumstances against them; and men can be distinguished by the favor of fortunate circumstances when they are not great.

The subject of this sketch must be classed among those who have become distinguished above their real merits by the

circumstances which made the ladder on which they went up to fame.

Had it not been for the war of the rebellion, there is no probability that he would have attained the rank of an average man. His past life for several years, his apparent business incompetency, and his habits, indicated less than an average success in life. He was wasting rather than augmenting his power.

But the opening of the war opened a career to him which put him where he waked up to honor, to duty and to a great life. All credit is due him for using nobly his opportunity. His country and kind have reaped the benefit of it.

ANCESTRY, BIRTH AND BOYHOOD.

The biographers of President Grant have generally said he was of Scotch descent. But Richard A. Wheeler, of Connecticut, claims to have traced his lineage directly to the west of England through the company of immigrants who came to Plymouth colony in 1630. Among those who came that year were Matthew and Priscilla Grant, who were then twenty-nine years old. "The west country people," as they were called in England, who came in that company, settled four miles from Boston, at Matapan, which is now Dorchester. Four years later several of these settlers went to the Connecticut valley, and among them was Matthew Grant, who had lost his wife and been left with four children. They settled at Winsdor, and much is said in the early records of the place of Matthew Grant as one of the most pious, honest and active citizens. His second son was Noah; and he had a son Noah who was active in the French and English war, in which George Washington began his career. During the war his wife died, leaving him two sons, Solomon and Peter. After a little while, with others, he went west to Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, on the Monongahela river. Two years after, he married Rachel Kelly, a widow, by whom he had seven children. The fourth child by this marriage was Jesse Root Grant, born January 23, 1794.

April, 1799, Noah Grant and his family moved down the river and settled in Columbiana county, Ohio. He made but a short stay, but went to the Western Reserve, where many Connecticut people were settling. Jesse was ten years old. Soon after, his mother died. They settled in Portage county, near Deerfield. When Jesse was fourteen he went to Youngstown, Trumbull county, and lived with Judge Todd. Two years after, he returned to Deerfield, where he remained two years to work with a tanner and learn the trade. At eighteen he was apprenticed to a half-brother in Maysville, Kentucky. In 1815 Jesse, now twenty-one, returned to Deerfield and set up tanning business for himself in a small way. Two years later he went to Ravenna and prospered in business; but the fever and ague drove him to Maysville. He regained his health; settled in Point Pleasant, in Ohio, on the river; married Hannah Simpson on the twentyfourth of June, 1821, and on the twenty-seventh of April, 1822, their first baby, Ulysses, came into their hands. He was named Hiram Ulysses.

Ten months after Ulysses was born the family moved to Georgetown, ten miles back from the river. Ulysses was a quiet, but not a diffident boy; was fond of sport, hunting and horses. When twelve years old he began to work with horses as a teamster in hauling lumber, logs, stone, etc., and soon showed unusual skill, for one so young. Hand work he disliked, but give him a team and he never wearied. He often took loads to Cincinnati, fifty miles away. When asked, once, "why his horses never got stalled," he replied instantly, "Because I never get stalled myself." Teaming, driving, working with horses was his favorite employment. He was shy of the tannery, but always glad to be with the team.

He went to school after he was four years old, summer and winter, and learned and recited fluently little pieces; was always ready with: "You'd scarce expect one of my age to speak in public on the stage," when his father asked for it.

After eleven he was too useful with a team to be spared for school, except three months in the winter. So his love of horses spoiled his early education. He was a sober, thoughtful

boy, peaceful, helpful, showing no special talent for anything

but teaming.

In school he was a little dull and slow, except in arithmetic, for which he showed more fondness.

He had two brothers and three sisters. His mother is always spoken of as a thoughtful, modest, sensitive woman, of much quiet worth, from whom he inherited the best of his characteristics. His father was a brusque, talkative, self-willed man, opinionated, dogmatic, at home with the coarser side of the world, not over-scrupulous, but self-urgent, pushing his own claims, because they seemed to him the all-important matters. The family were brought up in the Methodist church, the mother of Ulysses being a devout and conscientious member. Some say his father was a member also. The father was a heavy, broad-shouldered, thick-necked man, with head bent forward. The dominance of the material over the mental in his make-up was strong. Ulysses inherited from him bodily form and force, self-will and material supremacy. The quiet, retiring thoughtful element of his mother, gave him a cool, modest selfpoise, which was always one of the sources of his strength and success. In Ulysses there was a combination of the father and mother, but the mother prevailed. He grew up to a plain, chubby, round-faced country youth of seventeen, giving to those who knew him not the slightest glimpse of any ability to be a great leader or in any way a marked man. His characteristics as then known to his neighbors would have led them to expect from him a fair livery-stable man, rather than a military hero, or a president of the republic.

There was a military vein in the Grant family. One of the ancestors had been in the French and English war. He had often fired the younger members with his war stories. Ulysses had always evinced great interest in soldiers, trainings and musters. He hated the tannery, and when his father talked of his going to work in it, he spoke out his repugnance. "Well, what do you want to do?" the father asked. "I should like to be a farmer, or a river trader, or have an education," the boy replied.