Page:The youth of Washington (1910).djvu/39

 strict that they could not be broken, as in England, by agreement of father and son, but required to break them, in each case, an act of the Assembly. Families like our own were regarded rather as minor gentry, and were, for a time, owing in a measure to their having but moderate estates, looked down upon by certain of the great proprietors of enormous plantations and numberless slaves.

Whatever may have been the reason, or the reasons, I was more than once made to feel the fact that I was not looked upon as an equal by certain of these gentlemen, and this at an age when men are sensitive to such considerations.

My father, Augustine, has been described as a good planter and a man of energy. I apprehend that he was of a serious tendency, for Lawrence, my brother, once gave me to understand that most of the few books at Wakefield were religious; but whether this was so or not I do not know. Like some of the rest of us, my father had a high and quick temper, which, as he used to say, he had to keep muzzled. I remember being terrified at seeing him in a storm of anger because the clergyman who was to have bap