Page:The youth of Washington (1910).djvu/166

 a very young man he continued to be ever after, and that, although education and opportunity might give a man of strong character the tools for his purposes, they would not seriously alter his nature; he would only be more and more that which he had been.

As I sit in judgment upon the particulars which occasioned the affair at Great Meadows, and later my disaster at Fort Necessity, I am inclined to believe that I could have done no better at fifty than I did at twenty-two. I perceive also that the conditions which at that time surrounded and embarrassed me were on a lesser scale the same as those with which I had to struggle in the later and more important days, which made me old before my time. Such comparisons as these do not readily occur to me, as I am inclined to dwell most upon the needs of the present and upon the possibilities which the future may have in store.

On one occasion, during the march to Yorktown, when bivouacked at the head of the Elk, Colonel Scammel and Lieutenant-Colonel Hugh Wynne, both at that time of my military family, led me into expressing myself as to these earlier events, and one of