However poor an American township may be, it is seldom too poor to
afford its children a moderate and humble education. While James
Garfield was still very young, the settlers in the neighbourhood decided
to import a schoolmaster, whom they "boarded about" between them, after
a fashion very common in rural western districts. The school-house was
only a log hut; the master was a lad of twenty; and the textbooks were
of the very meagrest sort. But at least James Garfield was thus enabled
to read and write, which after all is the great first step on the road
to all possible promotion. The raw, uncouth Yankee lad who taught the
Ohio boys, slept at Widow Garfield's, with Thomas and James; and the
sons of the neighbouring settlers worked on the farm during the summer
months, but took lessons when the long ice and snow of winter along the
lake shore put a stop almost entirely for the time to their usual
labours.

James continued at school till he was twelve years old, and then, his
brother Thomas (being by that time twenty-one) went away by agreement
still further west to Michigan, leaving young Jim to take his place upon
the little farm. The fences were all completed by this time; the barn
was built, the ground was fairly brought under cultivation, and it
required comparatively little labour to keep the land cropped after the
rough fashion which amply satisfies American pioneers, with no rent to
pay, and only their bare living to make out of the soil. Thomas was
going to fell trees in Michigan, to clear land there for a farmer; and
he proposed to use his earnings (when he got them) for the purpose of
building a "frame house" (that is to say, a house built of planks)
instead of the existing log hut. It must be added, in fairness, that
hard as were the circumstances under which the young Garfields lived,
they were yet lucky in their situation in a new country, where wages
were high, and where the struggle for life is far less severe or