Marshall’s education was got from his father, from such teachers as the neighborhood furnished, and, for about a year, at a school in Westmoreland County, where his father and George Washington had attended, and where James Monroe was his own schoolmate. But most he owed to his father,--a man of good stock, of enterprise, experience, strong character and sense, himself of no mean education,--who, personally, took great pains with the training of his children. Marshall admired his father, and declared him to be a far abler man than any of his sons. From him and the teachers provided for him his son got a good knowledge of English history, literature, and poetry, and a fair acquaintance with the classics. All Marshall’s later youth was passed in the mountain region of Fauquier County, under the Blue Ridge. Judge Story declared that it was to the hardy, athletic habits of his youth among the mountains, operating, we may well conjecture, upon a happy physical inheritance, “that he probably owed that robust and vigorous constitution which carried him almost to the close of his life with the freshness and firmness of manhood.” The house that Marshall’s father built at Oakhill is still standing, an unpretending, small, frame building, having connected with it now, as a part of it, another house built by Marshall’s son Thomas. At one time the farm comprised an estate of six thousand acres.[1] Since 1865 it has passed out of the hands of the family. It is beautifully placed on high, rolling ground, looking over a great stretch of fertile country, and along the chain of the Blue Ridge, close by. To this region, where his children and kindred lived, about a hundred miles from Richmond, Marshall delighted to resort in the summer, all his life long. In the autumn of 1807, after the Burr trial, he writes to a friend, “The day after the commitment of Colonel Burr for a misdemeanor, I galloped to the mountains.” “I am on the wing,” he tells Judge Story in 1828, “for my friends in the upper country, where I shall find rest and dear friends, occupied more with their farms than with party politics.” When Marshall was about eighteen years old he began to study Blackstone; but he quickly dropped it, for the troubles with Great Britain thickened, and, like his neighbors, he prepared for fighting.