a movement of his army, a plain farmer's boy overheard the general's
remark that he had decided to march upon Gettysburg instead of
Harrisburg. The boy telegraphed this fact to Governor Curtin. A special
engine was sent for the boy. "I would give my right hand," said the
governor, "to know if this boy tells the truth." A corporal replied,
"Governor, I know that boy; it is impossible for him to lie; there is not
a drop of false blood in his veins." In fifteen minutes the Union troops
were marching to Gettysburg, where they gained a victory. Character is
power. The great thing is to be a man, to have a high purpose, a noble
aim, to be dead in earnest, to yearn for the good and the true.

"Your lordships," said Wellington in Parliament, "must all feel the high
and honorable character of the late Sir Robert Peel. I was long
connected with him in public life. We were both in the councils of our
sovereign together, and I had long the honor to enjoy his private
friendship. In all the course of my acquaintance with him, I never knew
a man in whose truth and justice I had greater confidence, or in whom I
saw a more invariable desire to promote the public service. In the whole
course of my communication with him, I never knew an instance in which he
did not show the strongest attachment to truth; and I never saw in the
whole course of my life the smallest reason for suspecting that he stated
anything which he did not firmly believe to be the fact."

"The Secretary stood alone," said Grattan of the elder Pitt. "Modern
degeneracy had not reached him. Original and unaccommodating, the
features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity. His august
mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so
impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, in order to be
relieved from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow system of
vicious politics, sunk him to the level of the vulgar great; but,
overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, his
ambition, fame. A character so exalted, so unsullied, so various, so
authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled at the
name of Pitt through all the classes of venality. Corruption imagined,
indeed, that she had found defects in this statesman, and talked much of
the inconsistency of his policy, and much of the ruin of his victories;
but the history of his country and the calamities of the enemy answer