Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/363

Rh that rare kind that it grows the nearer you approach it, and who, like every true American, did not allow himself to be ruled by time and by mankind, but who ruled them.

I rejoice in Washington's glorious statue in the capital of Virginia. I rejoice in that which I now read of him, sketched by Bancroft in the last pages of the third part of his “History of the United States.”

“The treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle had been negotiated by the ablest statesmen of Europe, in the splendid forms of monarchical diplomacy. They believed themselves the arbiters of mankind, the pacificators of the world, reconstructing the colonial system on a basis which should endure for ages, confirming the peace of Europe by the mere adjustment of material forces. At the very time of the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, the woods of Virginia sheltered the youthful George Washington, the son of a widow. Born by the side of the Potomac, beneath the roof of a Westmoreland farmer, almost from infancy his lot had been the lot of an orphan. No academy had welcomed him to its shades; no college crowned him with its honours; to read, to write, to cipher—these had been his degrees in knowledge. And now at sixteen years of age, in quest of an honest maintenance, encountering intolerable toil; cheered onward by being able to write to a schoolboy friend—‘Dear Richard, a doubloon is my constant gain every day, and sometimes six pistoles;’ himself his own cook, having no spit but a forked stick, no plate but a large chip; ‘roaming over spurs of the Alleghanies, and along the banks of the Schenandoah; alive to nature and sometimes spending the best of the day in admiring the trees and the richness of the land;’ among skin-clad savages with their scalps and rattles, or uncouth emigrants, that would never speak English; rarely sleeping in a bed, holding a bearskin a splendid couch; glad of a resting-place for the night on a little hay, straw,