Every evening he spent in the library with Lord Fairfax, reading. Sometimes it was a book of his own choice, and sometimes he read aloud to the earl, whose eyes were beginning to fail. Many of the books thus read were classical authors and scientific treatises, neither of which George had any natural fancy for. But he had the capacity to learn something from everything, and the most valuable lesson he got from his varied reading was the vast number of things of which he was ignorant compared with the small number of things he knew. This made him perfectly modest at all times. As for Lord Fairfax, he felt himself daily growing more passionately fond, in his quiet and restrained way, of the boy. He began to look forward with apprehension to the time when he must again be alone--a feeling he had never had before. He would gladly have kept George with him always, and provided for his future; but he knew well enough that Madam Washington would never give up this noble son of hers to anybody in the world. And so the two lived together, drawing closer and closer to each other, each of a silent, strong nature--the man of the world wearied of courts and camps, and the boy in his white-souled youth knowing nothing but the joy of living and the desire of living rightly, and both were happy in their daily and hourly companionship. CHAPTER VIII Indians were not an entirely new sight to George, but the few who occasionally came to Greenway were quite different from the thriftless, lazy, peaceable individuals and remnants of tribes that remained in remote parts of lower Virginia. There was an Indian village of forty or fifty in a piece of wild country about ten miles from Ferry Farm, but they were not dangerous, except to hen-roosts and pigsties; and although the men talked grandiloquently of the time when their forefathers owned the land and lived by hunting, they seemed perfectly satisfied themselves to sit and bask in the sun, smoking tobacco of the squaws’ raising, and living upon grain raised by the same hard-working squaws. But the first Indian that he saw at Greenway was altogether unlike these, and in George’s eyes vastly more respectable. He came one morning, just as George and Lord Fairfax had walked out on the porch after breakfast. He strode up the path carrying on his shoulder the dressed carcass of a deer. He was of medium height, but so superbly made and muscular that the heavy carcass seemed as light as a feather. He stalked up to the porch, and, throwing the carcass down, folded his arms with an air of supreme indifference, and waited to be addressed. “For sale?” asked the earl. The Indian nodded his head without speaking. Lord Fairfax called to Lance to bring his purse. Lance in a few minutes appeared, and the instant his eyes fell upon the Indian his countenance changed. Not so the Indian’s, who stood looking him squarely in the eye with characteristic stolidity.