slips in it. The aunt took out a ballot which read, “Ulysses.” This name was on several slips, because Grandfather Grant had just been reading the story of the siege of Troy. “Hiram” and “Albert” were on two other ballots. At last they decided to call the baby Hiram Ulysses Grant.
When “Baby Lysses,” as the family called him, was about a year old, the Grants moved to Georgetown, a village about ten miles farther from Cincinnati, and ten miles back from the Ohio. Here little Ulysses grew and began to go to school, and some of the boys called him “Hug,” from his initials, H. U. G. Other boys, just to be funny, called him “Useless.”
Ulysses’ father was a tanner and leather worker. The boy did not like tanning hides because it was dirty, bad-smelling work; but he did like horses. Besides his tannery, Mr. Grant owned a small farm. So Ulysses, while he was a boy, learned to plow and harrow, and to haul logs to the creek near by, where they were floated to the sawmill to be cut up into boards and timber. The lad found a good way to make a horse do the heavy work of lifting or rolling logs on to the sled, so that he and the horse could do that better than two or three men.
A visitor in Georgetown was astonished one day to see a boy dash by, standing on the back of a horse on the run.
“Circus rider?” the stranger asked.
“No—only ‘Useless’ Grant,” was the reply.
When a circus did come to Georgetown, the Grant boy was there to see the trained horses and the fancy riding. There was a trick pony that had been trained not to allow a man or even a boy to stay on its back. The manager came to the side of the ring and called out that a prize of five dollars in gold would be given to any one who could ride the pony five times around the ring. Some of the men and boys in the crowd shouted, “Lyss Grant can do it. Try it! Oh, go ahead, Lyss!”
Although Ulysses was a bashful lad and hated to make a show of himself, the prize and his desire to see what he could do were too tempting to resist. So he went to the ringside and began to pat the pony. Then he sprang lightly upon its back. The vicious little beast began to rear and tear around to shake or rub the rider off, but Ulysses hung on in spite of all its frantic efforts. He won the prize, but that five dollars was of small value compared with the lesson he learned of trying hard and not giving up anything he attempted.
The Grant boy’s mastery of horses and his way of finishing whatever he started out to do made his services valuable to the neighbors. He rode hundreds of miles on important business errands. One time he was driving two young ladies and their baggage on a long journey where they had to ford a swollen stream. The ladies, seeing the horses were swimming and that the wagon was full of water, began to scream and take hold of his arms.
“Keep quiet, please,” said Ulysses calmly. “I’ll take you through safe.” And the Grant lad was as good as his word.