in medicine, and then by earnest efforts to help not only himself but those around him. The doctor was the founder of the Christ Episcopal Church of Montpelier, and a man of deep religious convictions.
When George Dewey was but five years old he lost his mother, as tender and true a parent as ever boy had, and henceforth his companions of the household were his sister Mary, two years his junior, and his father. He lived in a modest cottage on a side street, and the Onion River swept through the fields in the back. It is on record that George Dewey, barefooted and ofttimes hatless, loved to play in and around that stream, and who knows but that there his first naval battles were fought, with rude wooden boats of his own jackknife designing?
When the proper time came the boy was sent to the village school, a bare enough place, with stiff wooden benches and rough desks, upon more than one of which he surreptitiously carved the initials G. D., and received for this what was considered, in those days of the ever-present birch rod, his just reward.
Whether it be a good or bad trait, it is said that
