Rensselaer Republican, Volume 13, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 September 1881 — “Those Garfield Boys.” [ARTICLE]

“Those Garfield Boys.”

Washington Star. “Those Garfield boys are as full of pluck as an egg is of meat,’’said an at-* tachee of the White House who has served there for twenty years to a Star reporter. “They are just like their father—and their mother, too —when it comes to a show of pluck. Why, that little Abe Garfield, he isn’t more’n 7 years old, will jump on his bicycle and nde right down those front steps of the White House portico. Don’t he get fads? Well, I should say he did; but he don’t mind them no more’n nothing. He’ll jump right up, get on that bicycle again,and go tearing down the yard like forty, right over stone curbing, or anything else, and maybe there be a lump on his head as big as a hen’s egg from the fall, tod. One day he rode right down the steps and got the hardest kind of a fall. His head struck that hard stone flagging. Before I could get to him he was up and getting on his bicycle again. I asked him, ‘Ain’t you hurt, Abe?’ By that time there was a knot farmed on the side of bis head half as big as my fist. He said yes it hurt a little, but then ‘he didn’t mind that,’ and away he went. “And there’s Irvine; he’s 10 or 12 years old. One day he undertook to climb over that iron railing around'the Treasury, over there by the fountain. He got an awful fall, and one leg oi his pants caught on the spikes, and he hung head downward. He didn’t holler like any other boy would have done—not a bit of IL He just called to some boys there to come and get him loose. He got his ankle sprained, but he wouldn’t have any help. He crawled all the way back to the White House, and nobody overheard a whim** per out of him. * One night I was standing at the front door of the house' Irvine came along, and he just lowered his head and ran at me to butt me. I jumped out of the way, and he ran his head against one of those iron doors with all his might. It knocked him down. I picked him up, and he was hurt, too, no doubt about that. I said: ‘lrve, are you hurt?’ Weil he just squeezed his head right tight in his hands and said, *Yes, some; but I didn’t cry. did I?’ Then he asked me ‘Would Scott Hayes have cried for that?’ His great ambition is to be more of a man than Scott Hayes, who was about his age. He didn’t cry, neither. You can’t make one of those Garfield boys cry. They’ve got too much pluck for that.”