Sometimes he was asked to break a horse to trot or to pace. The wildest animal would soon become tame and gentle and would do whatever he wished. People thought he would be a horse-trainer or jockey, or keep a racing stable, but Ulysses Grant, much as he enjoyed training horses, had a mind above doing that all his life.
He was studious at school and excelled in games and sports. One day, while playing with a neighbor boy, he batted the ball through the window of a neighboring house. Instead of running away or pretending that another boy had done it, Ulysses went at once and knocked at the door of the house, and said to the lady when she came out, “I have broken your window, but I’m going to get a pane of glass and have it put right in.”
The woman, who had seen how it happened, told the Grant boy to go back and play, and she would attend to the glass. In telling about the accident, she said Ulysses was no more to blame than the other boy, and ended her story with, “I like Lyss Grant; he’s such a square, manly little fellow.”
The school at Georgetown was not advanced enough to suit Ulysses’ father; so the lad was sent away to a private school at Marysville. When he came home, though he did not like the tannery, he worked faithfully there. He told his father plainly that he would work at tanning hides until he was twenty-one—“but not one day after that!”
“What would you like to do?” his father asked.
“I’d like to be a planter, or a river merchant, or—or—get an education,” stammered the boy.
Father Grant smiled and sent his son off to another school. He knew it would be very wrong to expect a real man to work all his life at something he did not like. While Ulysses was away this time, his father obtained an appointment for his son to go to West Point. Ulysses himself has written about this:
“I was attending school at Ripley, only ten miles distant from Georgetown, but spent the Christmas holidays at home. During this vacation my father received a letter from the United States Senator from Ohio. When he read it he said to me, ‘Ulysses, I believe you are going to receive the appointment.’
“ ‘What appointment?’ I inquired.
“ ‘To West Point. I have applied for it.’