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It was felt that the poor Ohio canal-boy had fitted himself, after an arduous struggle with poverty, for the high post to which he was likely to be called.
All his life he had been a worker, and a hard worker, from the time when he cut one hundred cords of wood, at twenty-five cents a cord, all through his experience as a canal-boy, a carpenter, a farm-worker, a janitor, a school teacher, a student, and a military commander, and now that he had taken his place in the grand council of the nation, he was not going to begin a life of self-indulgent idleness.
For the present, however, his duties as a canal-boy must be attended to, and they were soon to be resumed. About ten o'clock that night, when James was on duty, the boat approached the town of Akron, where there were twenty-one locks to be successively passed through.
He received the thanks of the commanding general for services which "called into action the highest qualities of a soldier fortitude, perseverance, courage," and a few weeks later a commission as brigadier-general of volunteers, to date from the battle of Middle Creek. So Jim Garfield, the canal-boy, has become a general. It is an important step upward, but where are others to come?
At last they rounded to at the Union camp, and then went up a cheer that might have been heard all over Kentucky. His waiting men, frantic with joy, seized their glorious commander, and were with difficulty prevented from bearing him on their shoulders to his quarters." The little army was saved from starvation by the canal-boy, who had not forgotten his old trade.
When the nominee of the convention had leisure to reflect upon his new position, and then cast his eye back along his past life, beginning with his rustic home in the Ohio wilderness, and traced step by step his progress from canal-boy to Presidential candidate, it must have seemed to him almost a dream.
"Of course I'm a fool," prodding the ground with his stick. "But if a man were in a jail cell and knew that the sun was shining just outside, he'd keep on beating at the wall." "Your life is not a jail cell. It's very comfortable, I think." "It has been bare enough. I have had a hard fight to live at all. I told you that I began as a canal-boy." She looked at him with quick sympathy.
Though in his rustic garb he was not well enough dressed to act as clerk in a Cleveland store, no one complained that he was not well enough attired for a canal-boy. It will occur to my young reader that, though the work was rather monotonous, there was not much difficulty or danger connected with it.
So the boy continued to ask questions, and the captain was more than once obliged to confess that he could not answer. He began to form a new opinion of his young cousin, who, though he filled the humble position of a canal-boy, appeared to be well equipped with knowledge. "I guess that'll do, Jim," he said after a while. "You've got ahead of me, though I didn't expect it.
Nowhere, perhaps, but in America could such a thing have happened, and even here it seldom happens that such an upward stride is made in so short a time. After all, however, the important question to consider is, "What sort of a college president did this humble canal-boy, who counted it promotion when he was elected a janitor and bell-ringer, become?"
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