light his scientific attainments. Among these we have several elegantly drawn and finely colored outlines of public buildings, at West Point, and national works at other places, with sketches of nature, characters and scenes that do marked credit to his talents

The youth of our country, who aspire to do her service and what true American youth does not?— may well profit by the juvenile example and cadet experience of Winfield Hancock. He had no advantages over many a lad reading these pages. He had to contend with the same obstacles that beset others. The secret of his success, thus far, was that he was obedient to his parents; he was found in his place at school; he profited by the examples set before him by his Christian parents; he neither despised nor shunned the duties connected with the instructions of the holy day; he learned to prize honesty, virtue, truth, magnanimity, as above all price; and when, therefore, he entered the trying arena of a great national military institution, to contest for the guerdons of learning, self-control, position and power among men, he was in a good measure prepared for the ordeal.

Young American readers! the destinies of this great nation are soon to be committed to your

hands. You are to frame and execute its laws; to raise, equip, and maintain its defences; to educate its masses, of which you yourselves are to be a part; to earn and manage its finances; to produce its crops, conduct its manufactures, display its arts, sail its ships, and represent it in all foreign lands. In a short time you are to fill the places of your fathers, who, in a single generation of thirty years, will have all passed away.

4

Be worthy, then, as WINFIELD was, of the high trust about to be consigned to your control. Be upright, be industrious, be obedient, be patriotic; and you will be fitting sons of the great American Republic.

CHAPTER VI.

HIS NATIVE COUNTY.

"The chief office of history is to rescue virtuous actions from the oblivion to which a want of records might consign them."-Tacitus.

T

HERE is much of deep historical interest in old Montgomery county, Pennsylvania. Before young WINFIELD, one of her choicest native sons, had gone from her abode to his cadetship at West Point, before he had begun to reflect lustre on her name by his brilliant and patriotic career, the history of the county was well worthy of honorable mention.

The settlement of this county was one of the earliest in the central part of the United States. As long ago as 1640, nearly half a century before the grant of William Penn was given to the first English proprietors, there were settlers along the banks of the Schuylkill and its tributaries, beyond the present boundaries of Norristown. The Hollander, the Swede, the Welshman, the German, the Englishman, were its primeval colonists, following in the track of the Algonquin, who then held supreme sway over all