At fifteen the boy was "a homeless orphan, a sick and sorrowful orphan,"
working for a saddler in Charleston a few hours of the day, as his
health would permit. With returning strength he got possession of a
horse; but his army associates had led him into evil ways, and he became
indebted to his landlord for board. This he managed to pay only by
staking his horse in a game of dice against $200, which he fortunately
won; and this squared him with the world and enabled him to start
afresh, on a better way.

Poor and obscure as he was, and imperfectly educated, he aspired to be a
lawyer; and at eighteen years of age he became a law-student in the
office of Mr. Spruce McCay in Salisbury, North Carolina. Two years
later, in 1787, he was admitted to the bar. Not making much headway in
Salisbury, he wandered to that part of the State which is now Tennessee,
then an almost unbroken wilderness, exposed to Indian massacres and
depredations; and finally he located himself at Nashville, where there
was a small settlement,--chiefly of adventurers, who led lives of
license and idleness.

It seems that Jackson, who was appointed district-attorney, had a
considerable practice in his profession of a rough sort, in that
frontier region where the slightest legal knowledge was sufficient for
success. He was in no sense a student, like Jefferson and Madison in the
early part of their careers in Virginia as village lawyers, although he
was engaged in as many cases, and had perhaps as large an income as
they. But what was he doing all this while, when he was not in his
log-office and in the log-court-room, sixteen feet square? Was he
pondering the principles or precedents of law, and storing his mind with
the knowledge gained from books? Not at all. He was attending