Stories we have of his boyhood; but they do not strike or stick to us as accounts of a boy. Even when cutting down the cherry-tree, and then scorning the boy’s ordinary deception in regard to the author of the deed; when mastering the blooded horse, at the expense of the animal’s life, and then hastening to avow to his stern but just mother his exclusive agency in the fatal conquest,—he seems the same calm, staid, mature impersonation of heroic Truth, as when he stalks with longer strides through a nation’s history. Some naturalists tell us that the trunk of the tree does not lose its bulk as it grows upward; but that, if we measure the tapering trunk and its outspreading branches, we shall find that together they form the same size and weight throughout. So Washington, if viewed in sections, appears of equal size, dimensions, and compacted force in each. As a boy wise, grave, and truthful; large in frame, of unusual strength, but gentle in its use; from books learning little, from men much, from out-door life its large, fresh, wholesome, healthy activity, and wide breadths of suggestion. As a young man unweariedly industrious, unmistakably honest, impressing all with his oak-like qualities; carefully and perfectly accomplishing whatever he undertook, whether engaged in surveying a farm, keeping a journal, or supplying by study and observation deficiencies in education which his own good, well-balanced sense had discovered; loving honestly, and honestly describing in verse his heart affection for his “lowland beauty.” As an officer, at twenty-three, self-reliant because consciously well disciplined, vigilant, careful, yet as personally brave as the impulsive and unrestrained; confided with missions to the hostile French settlements on the Ohio, and saving, by his knowledge of savage life and habits, by his sagacity, self-command, and tact, the remnants of Braddock’s army. As a statesman well rounded in intelligence, well poised in judgment, who so well comprehended, weighed, and settled the new questions of colonial rights as to draw from Patrick Henry the eulogy “that for solid information and sound judgment he was the greatest man on the floor” of the Continental Congress, and from that Congress itself its emphatic practical indorsement by his election as commander-in-chief.