perfection, and he grew up a striking example of the power and benefit of right early training. Virtues planted so deep in the heart are proof against the fiercest storms and severest temptations of life.

He had a decided taste for mathematics, which soon led him from the simple rules of arithmetic, into geometry, trigonometry and surveying; and he spent much of his time in surveying the lots around the school-house.

A fiery nature, that loves excitement and danger, joined to a mathematical taste and science, always gives a strong character, for it shows a union of the imaginative and reflective faculties, of energy and discretion, impulse and great accuracy-a union which in itself is power. Bonaparte exhibited these traits of character in an extraordinary degree, making him both rapid and exact-quick as the lightning's flash and as certain of its mark.

How different are the ways by which Heaven reaches results from those pursued by man! The wisest statesmen of France and England were absorbed in the affairs of this continent, and its fate depended, in their esti mation, wholly on the wisdom of their management and the strength of their armies, while around the form of a lad of thirteen, in a Virginia school-house, clustered its entire destinies.

Young Washington was not quite sixteen, when, with his education completed, he left school and launched forth into active life. The treaty of Aix la Chapelle, to the completion of which had been given the thought and effort of the wisest diplomatists in the world, had just closed. Around it had gathered the attention of all Europe, but men were mistaken, the destinies did not hover about that imposing convention, but attended the footsteps of this unknown lad, as he passed through the forests of his native land.

On apparently trivial matters often hinge the greatest

issues. Lawrence, the elder brother, having served as an officer in the English navy under General Wentworth and Admiral Vernon, in the expedition against the West Indies, he through them obtained a midshipman's berth for George. The latter was delighted at the prospect thus opened to him, and immediately began to make preparations for joining his vessel. His mother, however, wavered; she could not trust her first-born, her prop and stay, to the dangers and temptations of a naval life, and took it to heart so grievously that the project was finally abandoned. Once locked up in the British navy, and he never could have become the leader of the revolutionary army.

After George left school he went to his brother Lawrence, living at Mount Vernon, and passed the winter in studying mathematics and in practical surveying. He here became acquainted with the family of Lord Fairfax, whose daughter Lawrence had married, and through them was introduced into the highest circles of society. This eccentric but highly-cultivated nobleman took a great fancy to young George, and resolved to employ him in surveying large tracts of wild land which he owned in the interior. The young surveyor accepted his proposals, and, setting out in March, before the snows had left the summits of the Alleghany, entered the forest and passed an entire month amid the mountains. The third day out, after working hard till night, he sought shelter in a miserable hovel standing alone in the midst of a clearing. On retiring to bed, he undressed himself as usual, and jumped in. To his amazement, however, he discovered that his bed consisted of nothing but straw matted together, without sheets, and covered with a single dilapidated blanket, loaded down "with double its weight of vermin." His escapade from the straw was made with more alacrity than his entrance, and, dressing himself, he laid down outside. This was his first

lesson in frontier life, and he resolved after that to sleep out under the clear heavens.

Pushing his difficult way to the Potomac, he found the river swollen by the melted snows of the Alleghanies, and rolling such a turbulent flood that it was impossible to cross it. Waiting two days for the waters to subside, he then swam his horses across and kept up the Maryland side, and

in a drenching rain-storm made forty miles, "over the worst road ever trod by man or beast." Halting for a day and a half, till the storm broke, he came upon a party of thirty Indians, returning from a war expedition. Following the custom of those days, he gave them some rum, which so exhilarated them that they resolved to entertain him with a war-dance. Building a huge fire, they gathered around it, and, to the din of their wild music, treated the young surveyor to a scene as novel as it was picturesque. Thus day after day he kept on, and at length crossed the first ridge of the Alleghanies and entered on an almost untrodden wilderness, and commenced his surveys. Scattered Dutch settlers, that could not speak a word of English, collected as he passed, and the men, women and children, with their uncouth language, streamed after him to watch the mysterious process of surveying. They gathered together round his camp-fire, and made the night hideous with their grotesque appearance and half savage behavior.

Young Washington, only sixteen years of age, sitting by his camp-fire, its ruddy light flinging into bright relief the encircling forest, whose trunks, like columns of some old dimly-lighted cathedral, receded away in the gloom, surrounded by these half-savage children of the wilderness, would make a good subject for a painter. One night a violent storm arose the trees rocked and roared over head, and the wind, dashing down amid the embers, whirled them over the straw on which he lay, setting it on fire. In a moment the camp was in a blaze, and, but for the sudden waking of one of the men, Washington would have been wrapped in the flames. Sometimes the wind would suddenly shift, blowing the smoke full on the sleepers, when they would be compelled to bivouac out amid the trees.

Having accomplished the task assigned him ably, he obtained the appointment of public surveyor, and for three years, excepting the winter months, passed most of his time

in the wilderness. It was the same succession of hardships and exposures. To-day swimming rapid streams, to-morrow drenched and chilled, picking his way through the dripping forest-now reclining at the close of the day on some slope of the Alleghanies, and gazing off on the autumnal glories of the boundless solitude, as it lay bathed in the rich hues of the setting sun; and again, pitching his tent, beside his lonely camp-fire, whose light paled before the flashes that rent the gloom, while the peals of thunder that reverbe rated along the cliffs seemed trebly fearful in that far-off wilderness, he passed through scenes calculated to make a heart naturally bold impervious to fear, and an iron constitution doubly insensible to fatigue. A better training to impart self-reliance and coolness in the hour of peril, and indomitable energy, could not have been furnished, while those moral qualities which, amid the false tastes of more cultivated life, might have sickened, could. not but be strengthened by these long and glorious communions with nature. God sent Moses forty years in the wilderness before he would allow him to lead his chosen people to the land of Canaan. So did Washington pass a long novitiate amid the solitudes of his native country, the better to prepare him to lead the children of freedom to peace and security.

How little he imagined, as he stood on some ridge of the Alleghanies, and looked off on the sinking and swelling forests beyond, that in a short time those solitudes would be filled with the hum of cities, and that on those very summits would meet from either side the shout of millions on millions of free people, sending still higher, in reverence and transport, his own great name to the skies. Of all the gorgeous visions that flitted before his youthful imagination-of all the strange and marvelous destinies that the young heart will dream of, none were so strange and marvelous as that which actually befell him.