However poor an American township may be, it is seldom too poor to afford its children a moderate and humble education.  While James Garfield was still very young, the settlers in the neighbourhood decided to import a schoolmaster, whom they “boarded about” between them, after a fashion very common in rural western districts.  The school-house was only a log hut; the master was a lad of twenty; and the textbooks were of the very meagrest sort.  But at least James Garfield was thus enabled to read and write, which after all is the great first step on the road to all possible promotion.  The raw, uncouth Yankee lad who taught the Ohio boys, slept at Widow Garfield’s, with Thomas and James; and the sons of the neighbouring settlers worked on the farm during the summer months, but took lessons when the long ice and snow of winter along the lake shore put a stop almost entirely for the time to their usual labours.

James continued at school till he was twelve years old, and then, his brother Thomas (being by that time twenty-one) went away by agreement still further west to Michigan, leaving young Jim to take his place upon the little farm.  The fences were all completed, by this time; the barn was built, the ground was fairly brought under cultivation, and it required comparatively little labour to keep the land cropped after the rough fashion which amply satisfies American pioneers, with no rent to pay, and only their bare living to make out of the soil.  Thomas was going to fell trees in Michigan, to clear land there for a farmer; and he proposed to use his earnings (when he got them) for the purpose of building a “frame house” (that is to say, a house built of planks) instead of the existing log hut.  It must be added, in fairness, that hard as were the circumstances under which the young Garfields lived, they were yet lucky in their situation in a new country, where wages were high, and where the struggle for life is far less severe or competitive than in old settled lands like France and England.  Thomas, in fact; would get boarded for nothing in Michigan, and so would be able easily to save almost all his high wages for the purpose of building the frame house.

So James had to take to the farm in summer, while in the winter he began to work as a sort of amateur carpenter in a small way.  As yet he had lived entirely in the backwoods, and had never seen a town or even a village; but his education in practical work had begun from his very babyhood, and he was handy after the usual fashion of American or colonial boys—­ready to turn his hand to anything that happened to present itself.  In new countries, where everybody has not got neighbours and workmen within call, such rough-and-ready handiness is far more common than in old England.  The one carpenter of the neighbourhood asked James to help him, on the proud day when Tom brought back his earnings from Michigan, and set about the building of the frame house, for which he had already collected