in pursuit. The chase led up the middle of the main village street, and everybody rushed out to see it. The pedagogue ran, his flying coat-tails and long hair tossed in the wind, shaking his stick, and making the most terrible threats. The boy's strength began to fail; the master was gaining; escape seemed impossible. Just then the friendly door of a tin-shop appeared wide open. The tinsmith, Sam Cassell, was a great friend of Phil's, and to him the boy rushed.

"Hide me, Sam," he begged. There was not a second to lose. The old man was at work on a big copper kettle. Quick as a flash he clapped the kettle over the boy, and when the teacher arrived the tinsmith was calmly hammering away at a rivet, within two inches of the fugitive's head.

"Where's that boy who ran in here?" panted McNally.

"I don't know. He went out back somewhere," responded Cassell. The teacher looked and looked; but Sheridan was not to be found, and his baffled pursuer returned to the school-house. An hour later little Phil came back also, well knowing that McNally's anger would be cooled. The teacher let the boy walk to his desk, and never said a word about the fight or chase.

Phil Sheridan was, from his earliest boyhood, a lover of soldiers. His eye danced and his heart beat whenever there was a drill of the village militia company. Every summer he would get a dozen of his school-mates, and persuade them that it was the best fun in the world to play soldier. His friend Cassell would let him have a sword of the sharpest and brightest tin, and, of course, Phil was always captain. But there would always be some mutinous boy who wanted to be captain, too, and Sheridan's company usually broke up in confusion.

A hundred other stories like this are told in the town where he grew up, but it would take a volume to record the anecdotes of his boyhood days. His fame is the pride of the village, and the casual visitor who chances to stop at Somerset is never allowed to leave without due notice of the fact that this little village has raised a great soldier for the army. These humble people love to tell that one of the traits of this boy, besides his love of fun and soldiering, was that he never knew fear. He was always ready to stand his ground against any odds. The school-master who taught him his earliest lessons has long since passed away; but his school-mates say that Phil Sheridan never studied in earnest until he thought he had a chance to go to West Point.

Then he devoted all his energies to cramming for his examination. He got his appointment in 1849, and by dint of his friends' aid, passed the ordeal, and was admitted to the military academy. For two years the village lost sight of him, and then he came home on his first leave of absence. He brought two companions with him, the now famous General Crook, and Colonel Nugent, who afterwards made something of a mark in the army. These three cadets were the lions of the town, and picnics, rides, and rural frolics filled the summer.

This first summer that Sheridan passed at home after his entrance to West Point is often spoken of by his neighbors. He closed his round of pleasures by thrashing a lawyer named Henessey, twice as large as himself, who had made some idle remark about his family. The story of this fight is about the last reminiscence these plain people give of the poor boy who used to live amongst them, but who is now General of the Army. He was graduated in the class of 1853, and immediately appointed a brevet second lieutenant in the First Infantry. Almost all they knew of him in recent years was that, until her recent demise, he came now and then to see his mother, and in the glamor of his official life had not forgotten the homely days of his youth.

CHAPTER III.

WEST POINT AND THE ARMY.

HIS LIFE AT THE MILITARY ACADEMY ON THE HUDSON EARLY EXPERIENCES IN THE ARMY AFTER GRADUATION INTERESTING STORIES OF FRONTIER LIFE OUTBREAK OF THE REBELLION HIS FIRST SERVICE IN WAR-NOT A VERY BRILLIANT BEGINNING.

THE boy, who at ten years of age had whipped. every one of his size and weight in the town of Somerset, and received the surrender of his school-master, whom with the aid of his dog, he had ignominiously driven up a tree, was a fitting candidate, a few years later, for a West Point cadetship.

It was in the year 1847, while employed as a clerk in the dry goods store of Fink & Dittoe at Somerset, that young Sheridan had his ambition fired with a desire to enter the military academy. There was a vacant cadetship at the dis

posal of General Ritchie, then a representative in Congress from the district in which Somerset was included. The ambitious boy made his application direct, writing and signing the letter himself and having no indorsements attached.

The congressman made the appointment, and the nominee went

earnestly and industriously to work supplying the deficiencies of a limited education. He placed himself under the tuition of a Mr. Clark, a fine mathematician and excellent teacher. Pupil and teacher worked hard, and at the end of three months young Sheridan was ready for his examination. He left Somerset for West Point and was admitted to the academy in the spring of 1848.

No more peculiar looking lad had ever been admitted. He is, to-day, one of the most notable appearing of men, when one associates with so commanding a military reputation, the physique which is commonly presumed to be part of a soldier's qualifications. . On horseback and in battle, General Sheridan is the very embodiment of conflict. He is the apotheosis in his personality of both brain and blow; of intellect and action; of swift conception and daring execution. Some one who has known him well declares that in the field "Sheridan was a terribly ugly man." He was profanely bitter in cases of unneeded delay or failure: not sparing himself, he never spared others." He never raved or frothed at the mouth, but he was short, sharp, hot, peppery, crusty, sarcastic, vehement, and full of fight even with his own staff. Excuses were in vain. When his manœuvres were successful he never stopped to receive praise; he accepted it as perfectly natural; but when anything went wrong he was perfectly savage."

The boy was father to the man: the West Point cadet proved himself the forerunner of the mature soldier. His appearance at the academy excited both curiosity and amusement, and his peculiar build made him the butt of his class, until it became painfully evident to those who practiced their jokes that he was a dangerous subject to jest with. General Hascall, one of his classmates, and now resident of Indianapolis, says:

His

"He was one of the most peculiarly built boys I ever saw. chest was very large and full, his legs short and small, and his arms so phenomenally long that his hands reached far below his knees as he walked. His physical peculiarities were so marked before he finally and fully developed that he came very near being rejected by the examining board on that account."

It was those long arms of his that enabled Sheridan to become one of the finest swordsmen of his age. His knowledge of horses stood him in excellent stead, and his audacious courage in handling and riding them soon made him a leader in the riding school. On horseback Sheridan looks to be a large man. On his feet, he is indeed peculiar. In these later and famous days, he excites as much comment as did

his rustic, ungainly appearance at the military academy forty years since. At the headquarters of the army, or elsewhere in Washington, Sheridan, unless met face to face, would surprise a stranger almost to incredulity by his appearance. He is careless of dress, and like most American officers, especially in the regular army, gets as far away from uniform when off duty as is possible. His short figure has grown very rotund with increasing years and comparative ease. Seen by a correspondent a short time before his serious sickness, he was thus described:

"He wore upon the back of his round, bullet head a very slim, high, old-fashioned silk hat of a style that was popular at the close of the Civil War. It was about two sizes too small. His short, iron gray hair stood out from under the rim of his hat at nearly right angles with it. His red, weather-beaten face did not show any new lines of advancing age, but his grizzly, iron-gray mustache and imperial were whitening very fast. He wore a short, light, yellow-gray overcoat which had only two buttons on it, and they were nearly ready to fly off from the undue strain of Sheridan's round figure. The coat like the hat, appeared to have been long outgrown. The trousers were a gray plaid and fitted very snugly to the general's fat legs. His boots were thick soled and unblacked. He wore no gloves. The side and rear views of the general suggested a low comedy man who had walked off the stage all made up for a funny part; but when you came to look at the general square in the face, its stern, solemn, composed lines were enough to make one forget his grotesque figure and careless dress."

Cadet Sheridan at his studies and books was more inapt and dull than at his drill and exercises, yet that he was a poor scholar is not at all a correct statement. The academic curriculum was even then too severe to permit a dullard or dunce to graduate successfully. Sheridan was simply an average scholar, and a superior soldier-cadet. He was a sturdy, self-respecting "pleb," and did not allow himself to be bullied by the cadets, chiefly from the slave-holding states and the cities of the North, who presumed to set up in business as the aristocrats of the academy. At that period the northern cadet who did not succumb to the social and political blandishments which were under the control of pro-slavery influences that dominated the country and all its administrative forces, had indeed a rocky path to climb, and found his way to even legitimate advancement a severe one. Young Sheridan did not quarrel with the prevailing tone of the period, it is true, but found himself socially ignored by the cadets more favored in person