of apparently insignificant detail in the interpretation of a tremendously vital yet bafflingly inexpressive sort of man—an "extravert," I fancy our psychologists would call him, a man with a "reflex mechanism" which expressed itself so adequately in muscular and practical activities that all the forms of emotion and reflection which result in most men from checked impulse are almost non-existent in this record.
But has not the public had access to these diaries hitherto? To certain parts of them, yes—to some of the rare and therefore uncharacteristic purple passages in them. For example, when young Washington, twenty-three years old, returned from his thrillingly venturous mission with his Dutch interpreter and four chiefs of the Six Nations to the French commandant at Fort Le Bœuf, in 1755, Dinwiddie, the Governor of Virginia, gave him just one day's warning to write up his notes of the trip for the inspection of the Legislature, and straightway rushed the narrative through the public printing office, as any newspaper man with the faintest sense of an amazingly live "story" would have done. It has the very whiff and smell of powder and rum and tobacco twist in it, and the intrigue and nervous tension of the frontier at the moment when English, French and Indians were reaching for one another's scalps. Of that hotly printed edition two copies are extant.
There are other fragments, too, that got into print long ago, and contrary to expectation and desire. The notes extending from March to June, 1754, were cap* tured by the French at Fort Necessity, published in Paris, retranslated and published in London, and thence returned to their author. Here again was a great news story of the highest interest to three na-
