After Grant got fairly well started in his studies, the best he could say for himself is in this characteristic sentence to his father: “I don’t expect to make very fast progress, but I will try to hold on to what I get.” Here was somewhat a foreshadowing of the bulldog tenacity which afterward made him so famous.—Nicholas Smith, “Grant, the Man of Mystery.”
(3195)
See [Clinging by Faith].
Tenacity of Birth and Training—See [Aristocracy, Ingrained].
TENDENCIES, INHERITED
From earliest childhood, says his mother, Charles Hamilton (the aviator), has given unmistakable evidence of his desire to leave the earth and invade the skies. The mother—who, with perfect confidence in his ability, saw her son go aloft in an aeroplane for the first time and immediately wanted to take a trip on it with him—dates her first realization of this fact to the day when Charles, but eight years old, surreptitiously borrowed her best parasol, climbed with it tightly clutched in his hands to the eaves of the barn, and then jumped off, employing the parasol parachute-wise to break his fall.
He not only broke his fall, but he completely smashed the parasol in that little escapade. But his mother did not have the heart to punish the child for his act because, as she put it, “I realized that, after all, it was only the budding desire to fly that I myself have felt since early girlhood. How could I punish my boy for doing what I always had wanted to do?”
The interim between that barn-and-parasol episode of Hamilton’s achievement of his insatiable ambition—to fly—was the matter of only a few years. He managed to get a balloon man, who was giving exhibitions in a spherical gas bag just outside of New Britain, to take him up. From that moment his fever to invade the sky knew no bounds, and, as he himself put it only a few days ago, never is he happier than when up in his aeroplane doing the now-famous Hamilton dip.
After a lapse of several years, during which he left his beloved machinery and aerial paraphernalia long enough to get in some schooling, Hamilton turned his attention to ballooning on his own account. Then kites of all fashions, shapes and sizes took up his attention. The dirigible balloon coming in, he turned to that, and for four years gave exhibitions that startled the world by their daring and success. Then he returned to the kite end of the game, working with Israel Ludlow along those lines of aviation. Finally he made his first aeroplane ascension, and since then he has done almost everything possible to do with a heavier-than-air machine of the present-day type.
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