Oh yes, anything in reason!" If not true, the story is good enough to be true, as its currency attests; but whether true or no, the "fable teaches" that post-graduate study in the old army was done under difficulties.
The course of study at West Point had narrower limitations than most people think, and it would be easy to be unfair by demanding too much of the graduates of that military college.

The course of study was of four years, but the law forbade any entrance examinations on subjects outside of the usual work done in the rural common schools.
The biographies of Grant, of Sherman, of Sheridan, of Ormsby Mitchell, and of others show that they in fact had little or no other preparatory education than that of the common country school.
[Footnote: Grant, in his Personal Memoirs (vol.i.p.

24), says of the school in his early Ohio home, that the highest branches taught there were "the three R's,--Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic.

I never saw," he says, "an algebra or other mathematical work higher than the arithmetic, in Georgetown, until after I was appointed to West Point.

I then bought a work on algebra in Cincinnati, but having no teacher it was Greek to me."] The course of study and amount of education given must necessarily be limited, therefore, to what boys of average ability and such preparation could accomplish in the four years.