WINFIELD SCOTT HANCOCK. ·

CHAPTER I.

BIOGRAPHY.

HIS BOYHOOD AND YOUTH.

HERE are some maxims that grow more pre

cious with age because they seem to apply

more forcibly every day to the ordinary transactions of life. One of these is that of the ancient philosopher who declared that most history was false except in its dates and names, and that much fiction was true except in its dates and names. The life of WINFIELD SCOTT HANCOCK is an experience that sometimes reads like romance and reality combined. It is a succession of lessons to young and to old, and we can read none of it without feeling that Hancock was raised among good people and by careful parents, who had instilled their own domestic methods into his early training. The impression his experience makes upon me revives another saying of the great Roman

freedman, Terence, who, more than two thousand years ago, wrote, "I am a man and have an interest in everything that concerns humanity."

The ancestral homestead of General Hancock, on the maternal side, stands in Montgomery Co., Pa., half a mile east of Lansdale and about twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. The old portion of the house was erected in 1728, and the new portion in 1764. In this house the mother of General Hancock resided at the time of her marriage to the General's father. The county in which this historic homestead stands was named after General Montgomery, who fell at Quebec, and whose monument stands in St. Paul's Churchyard, New York. At the time of his marriage, Mr. Benjamin Franklin Hancock-father of General Hancock-was living in what was afterwards the birth-place of General Hancock, some three miles east of Lansdale. It stands about half a mile east of the Square, and it is a solid, well-preserved building, of fine appearance.

When young Ilancock was a year old, his father removed from this old mansion to a house of less pretensions, somewhat nearer to Montgomery Square, where he resided and taught school under the same roof. The school-house residence is still standing, but greatly altered in appearance. Two years later, young Hancock's father removed to Norristown, and there taught school and practiced law till he died, at the age of sixty-seven years.

The ancestors of General Hancock, on both sides, belonged to families of revolutionary fame, and were engaged in all the wars, from the French and Indian, before the Revolution, down to the war of 1812.

The father of General Hancock married against the will of his guardian, who was a Quaker, and joined the Baptists, to whom his wife belonged, and became a deacon in the Baptist church at Norristown. He was a constitutional man and a Democrat, but not a politician, and never sought or held any political office. When his son, the present General Hancock, at the age of sixteen, went to West Point, the Quakers attempted to induce the sister of his father's guardian, Miss Polly Roberts, to cut off young Winfield in her will, as the profession of a soldier, educated as a man of war, was not to be encouraged. She remained steadfast, however, until General Hancock had graduated and gone to Mexico and become engaged with the enemy, and, as she supposed, had "killed people." Then the "Friends" said it was impossible she could bestow a legacy upon a person who was killing men by wholesale, and this prevailed. Winfield was cut off in the will. But, as she suspected that the "Friends" wanted her money, she provided for the younger brother in place of Winfield.

In this old homestead his grandfather died, at 84, and was buried in the churchyard at Mont