Page:Bierce - Collected Works - Volume 09.djvu/54

50 endeavoring to transgress the boundary of that desolate domain falls frosted in its flight.

Some one — Colonel Ingersoll, I fancy — has said that Washington is a steel engraving. That is hardly an adequate conception, being derived from the sense of sight only; the ear has something to say in the matter, and there is much in a name. Before my studies of his character had effaced my childish impression I used always to picture him in the act of bending over a tub.

There are two George Washingtons — the natural and the artificial. They are now equally "great," but the former was choke-full of the old Adam. He swore like "our army in Flanders," loved a bottle like a brother and had an inter-colonial reputation as a lady-killer. He was, indeed, a singularly interesting and magnetic old boy — one whom any sane and honest lover of the picturesque in life and character would deem it an honor and an education to have known in the flesh. He is now known to but few; you must dig pretty deeply into the tumulus of rubbishy panegyric — scan pretty closely the inedited annals of his time, in order to see him as he was. Criss-crossed upon these failing parchments of the past are the lines of the sleek