Stern as was the parental discipline of the time, the spirit of the young men, who were accounted grown and marriageable at nineteen, was in no wise broken or quenched. Many of them ran away from their masters at the schools in England and Scotland, and their fathers' agents had much ado to find and capture them again. The sons of John Spotswood were lost in England for many months, but were back home again in time to be gallant officers in the Revolution. And even the conservative blood of the Washingtons was not strong enough to temper that of the Willises, for Mildred Washington's grandson "Jack" Willis ran away from school and joined a party to explore the wilderness of Kentucky. They were attacked by Indians, and were scattered; Jack escaped in a canoe, and was the _first white man_ to descend the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. His father had sewed some doubloons in his jacket, but he gave them to a man in New Orleans to purchase clothing and food, and never again beheld his agent or the doubloons or their equivalent. He worked his way in a sailing vessel to New York, and _walked_ from New York to his home in Virginia, arriving, like the Spotswood boys, just in time to enter the army with his father and serve to its close. He was a son of Lewis Willis, Washington's schoolmate. About 1740 the importation of horses of the English racing stock commenced, also the breeding of horses for racing. Between 1740 and 1775 are recorded the names of fifty imported horses and thirty mares of note: Aristotle, Babraham, Bolton, Childers, Dabster, Dottrell, Dimple, Fearnaught, Jolly Roger, Juniper, Justice, Merry Tom, Sober John, Vampire, Whittington, Janus, Sterling, Valiant, etc. Owners of these horses among Mary Washington's neighbors were Roger Gregory, Colonel John Mercer of "Marlboro," Mr. Spotswood, William Fitzhugh of "Chatham," all the Thorntons, and _later_ Colonel George Washington of Mount Vernon, who was a steward of the Alexandria Jockey Club and ran his own horses there and at Annapolis! There was a fine race-course at Fredericksburg, and purses were won from ten to a hundred pounds. This, the prime amusement in spring, summer, and autumn, was varied (alas!) by cock-fights, wrestling-matches, and rough games, in which the common people, as in England, participated, while the gentry looked on and awarded prizes. But in the long winter evenings, neighbors gathered for Christmas and other house-parties, indulged in the gentle art of story-telling. Later, old Fredericksburg boasted a notable, peerless raconteur, John Minor, but his stories were built upon Virginia's legends; his home, "Hazel Hill," was the rendezvous of all the neighbors, young and old, in quest of sympathy or counsel, or advice in the honorable settlement of quarrels, or for a season of genial companionship. Around the fireside at "Hazel Hill" the children would gather for their own story-telling hour "between daylight and