Page:How to Get Strong (1899).pdf/453

 he would generally manage to clear it."—Porter's Campaigning with Grant.

Lieutenant-Colonel Church, editor of the Army and Navy Journal, in his Life of Grant, says: "When the regular services were completed, the class, still mounted, was formed in a line through the centre of the hall. The riding-master placed the leaping-bar higher than a man's head, and called out 'Cadet Grant.' A clean-faced, slender, blue-eyed young fellow, weighing about one hundred and twenty pounds, dashed from the ranks on a powerfully built chestnut-sorrel horse, and galloped down the opposite side of the hall. As he turned at the farther end and came into the stretch across which the bar was placed, the horse increased his pace, and, measuring his strides for the great leap before him, bounded into the air, and cleared the bar, carrying his rider as if man and beast had been welded together. The spectators were breathless.

Very well done, sir!' growled old Herchberger, the riding-master, and the class was dismissed and disappeared; but 'Cadet Grant' remained a living image in my memory.

"A few months before graduation one of Grant's class-mates, James A. Hardie, said to his friend and instructor: "Well, sir, if a great emergency arises in this country during our lifetime, Sam Grant will be the man to meet it.' If I had heard Hardie's prediction I doubt not I should have believed it, for I thought the young man who could perform the feat of horsemanship and who wore a sword could do anything.

"A leap of five feet six and one-half inches made by Cadet Grant on Old York, a horse that no one else dared ride, still holds the record at West Point for high jumping. To a companion who said, 'Sam, that horse