struggle with my studies the next year. While
sitting on the east porch of the hospital in the afternoon, I
attracted the kind attention of General Winfield Scott, who became
from that time a real friend, and did me a great service some years
later.

CHARACTER OF THE WEST POINT TRAINING

In our third-class encampment, when corporal of the guard, I had
a little misunderstanding one night with the sentinel on post along
Fort Clinton ditch, which was then nearly filled by a growth of
bushes. The sentinel tore the breast of my shell-jacket with the
point of his bayonet, and I tumbled him over backward into the
ditch and ruined his musket. But I quickly helped him out, and
gave him my musket in place of his, with ample apologies for my
thoughtless act. We parted, as I thought, in the best of feeling;
but many years later, a colonel in the army told me that story, as
an illustration of the erroneous treatment sometimes accorded to
sentinels in his time, and I was thus compelled to tell him I was
that same corporal, to convince him that he had been mistaken as
to the real character of the treatment he had received.

That third-class year I lived in the old North barracks, four of
us in one room. There, under the malign influence of two men who
were afterward found deficient, I contracted the bad habit of
fastening a blanket against the window after "taps," so that no
one could see us "burning the midnight oil" over pipes and cards.
The corps of cadets was not as much disciplined in our day as it
is now. If it had been, I doubt if I should have graduated. As
it was, I got 196 demerits out of a possible 200 one year. One
more "smoking in quarters" would have been too much for me. I
protest now, after this long experience, that nothing else at West
Point was either so enjoyable or so beneficial to me as smoking.
I knew little and cared less about the different corps of the army,
or about the value of class standing. I became quite indignant
when a distinguished friend rather reproved me for not trying to
graduate higher--perhaps in part from a guilty conscience, for it
occurred just after we had graduated. I devoted only a fraction
of the study hours to the academic course--generally an hour, or
one and a half, to each lesson. But I never intentionally neglected
any of my studies. It simply seemed to me that a great part of my
time could be better employed in getting the edu