Byron—­“Don Juan,” in particular—­had an effect upon the youth, and “The Prisoner of Chillon” gave him dreams.  “Snarleyow” was the book, though, which struck him as something great in literature.  The demon dog tickled his fancy amazingly.  He was somewhat older when he read “Jane Eyre” and “John Brent,” and could recognize a little of their quality, but “Snarleyow” came to him at an age when there was nothing in the world to equal it.

Meanwhile the whole face of nature was changing, and the boy was necessarily keeping up with the procession of new things.  Broad meadows were where even he, a mere boy still, had seen dense woodland; there were highways, and it was far from the farmhouse door to the forests edge.  The fauna had diminished.  The bear and wolverine had gone forever.  The fox rarely barked at night; the deer and wild turkey were far less plentiful, though the ruffed grouse still drummed in the copses, and the quail whistled from the fences.  Different, even, were the hunters in their methods.  The boy, whose single-barreled shot-gun had known no law, now carried a better piece, and scorned to slay a sitting bird.  Both he and Alf became great wing shots, and clever gentlemen sportsmen from the city who sometimes came to hunt with them could not hope to own so good a bag at the day’s end.  Wise as to dogs and horses were they, too, and keen riders at country races.  And ridges of good muscles stiffened now their loins, and their chests were deepening, and at “raisings,” when the men and boys of the region wrestled after their work was done, the two were not uncounted.  For them the country school had accomplished its mission.  The world’s geography was theirs.  Grammar they had memorized, but hardly comprehended.  As for mathematics, they were on the verge of algebra.  Then came the force of laws of politics and trade, a shifting of things, and Grant strode out of nature to learn the artificial.  His family was removed to town.

Western, or rather Northwestern, town life, when the town has less than ten thousand people, varies little with the locality.  There is the same vigor everywhere, because conditions are so similar.  It is odd, too, the close resemblance all through the great lake region in the local geography of the towns.  Small streams run into larger ones, and these in turn enter the inland seas, or the straits, called rivers, which connect them.  Where the small rivers enter the larger ones, or where the larger enter the straits or lakes, men made the towns.  These were the water cross-roads, the intersections of nature’s highways, and so it comes that to so many of these towns there is the great blue water front intersected at its middle by a river.  There is a bridge in the town’s main street, and the smell of water is ever in the air.  Boys learn to swim like otters and skate like Hollanders, and their sisters emulate them in the skating, though not so much in the swimming