George early learned to ride and swim and excelled at outdoor sports and games, thanks to a strong body and determined, energetic spirit. An early biographer, Weems, tells many stories of his childhood which are widely known. Of their truth or falsehood we cannot be sure. One is the famous story that George cut down a valuable cherry tree belonging to his father, and promptly confessed his misdeed, choosing punishment rather than falsehood. Another is that he undertook in boyish bravado to subdue his mother’s favorite colt and continued the struggle until the animal burst a blood-vessel and died. This, also, he immediately confessed, and his mother while grieved over the death of her colt “rejoiced that her son was brave and truthful.” Mr. Washington died when George was only ten years old, and on the mother devolved the early training of the children. After his early childhood, George was with her but little. He was sent, soon after his father’s death, to live with one of his older brothers to attend school. When he was fourteen, it was planned that he should go as a sailor, but the plan was given up and he returned to school and took up the study of surveying. His half-brother Lawrence, fourteen years older than he, was a soldier; perhaps as a boy George, who admired and loved this brother, wished and planned to be a soldier, too. If so, he no doubt thought that he would wear a British uniform and fight for the king as did his brother, for the colonists then were contented and loyal subjects of England. Lawrence Washington after his father’s death inherited the estate of Washington and changed its name to Mount Vernon, in honor of an English admiral under whom he had served. Lawrence Washington, who was a fine, manly fellow, married a Miss Fairfax whose home was near Mount Vernon. She was a cousin of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, an English gentleman who came to America to look after land which he had inherited from his grandfather. This was a royal grant of all the land between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers. Lord Fairfax did not even know how many thousands of acres were in this great estate. So he employed young George Washington to explore and survey his lands. George Washington was sixteen years old when he set out, March, 1748, with one companion, to explore and survey Lord Fairfax’s land. He had a good horse and a gun as well as his surveyor’s instruments, and the two youths spent several weeks on the trip. Sometimes they met Indians and sat beside their camp fires and watched their war dances. Sometimes they slept outdoors, sometimes they spent the night in the rude huts of the settlers. “I have not slept above three or four nights in a bed,” George Washington wrote, “but after walking a good deal all the day, I have lain down before the fire on a little straw, or fodder, or a bearskin, whichever was to be had, with man, wife, and children, like dogs and cats; and happy is he who gets the berth nearest the fire.”