GROWING IN WISDOM AND STATURE.


The school was in the village a mile and a half away. It was a long walk
for a little boy of four, but sometimes his sister Mehetabel, now
thirteen years old, carried him on her back. When in winter the snow lay
deep on the ground Jimmy's books were brought home, and he recited his
lessons to his mother.

This may be a good time to say something of the family whose name in
after years was to become a household word throughout the republic. They
had been long in the country. They were literally one of the first
families, for in 1636, only sixteen years after the Pilgrims landed on
Plymouth rock, and the same year that Harvard College was founded,
Edward Garfield, who had come from the edge of Wales, settled in
Watertown, Massachusetts, less than four miles from the infant college,
and there for more than a century was the family home, as several
moss-grown headstones in the ancient graveyard still testify.

They did their part in the Revolutionary war, and it was not till the
war was over that Solomon Garfield, the great grandfather of the future
President, removed to the town of Worcester, Otsego County, N.Y. Here
lived the Garfields for two generations. Then Abram Garfield, the father
of James, moved to Northeastern Ohio, and bought a tract of eighty
acres, on which stood the log-cabin, built by himself, in which our
story opens. His wife belonged to a distinguished family of New
England--the Ballous--and possessed the strong traits of her kindred.

But the little farm of eighty acres was smaller now. Abram Garfield died