CHAPTER II.
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.