Yorkville Enquirer

YOUTH OF FERDINAND WARD.—The Caledonia, New York, Advertiser says:

"Strange things happen in this world, but one of the strangest in this century was the manner of Gen. Grant's ruin and by such an instrument as Ferdinand Ward. During the lapse of time between 1861 and 1876, while Grant was winning world-wide fame as a soldier in the field and as President of the United States, the person that was destined to drag him in sorrow and misery to the grave was an unpromising Geneseo stripling, a youth without honor at home and unknown outside of the village limits—in short, a good-for-nothing young bummer, apparently without a single qualification that would mark him as one likely to win in future life so much as a nod of recognition even from the mightiest soldier and most illustrious citizens of the United States of his day. And yet, if this young scallawag had been shot in one of his ribald sprees or struck by lightning, Gen. Grant would in all human probability have been rich and enjoying moderately good health to-day. For however obscure Ferd. Ward was as a boy, there was a certain devilish, latent talent there for cunning and wild speculation possessed, perhaps, by no other human being, and, as it happened, those peculiar qualifications were so directed as not only to hoodwink, deceive and ruin the unsuspecting Grant, but men of ripe experience in financial affairs. Had a soothsayer appeared in Geneseo twenty years ago and predicted such a future for the lad Ward, he would have been sent to a lunatic asylum as a dangerous character to be at large. Such are the mysterious ways of Providence in shaping our ends here below."