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man? Who knows not that the only education which he enjoyed was that of the common schools of Virginia, which, at that day, were of the very commonest sort? Who remembers not those extraordinary youthful adventures, by which he was trained up to the great work of his destiny? Who remembers not the labors and exposures which he encountered as a land surveyor at the early age of sixteen years? who has forgotten the perils of his journey of forty-one days, and five hundred and sixty miles, from Williamsburg to French Creek, when sent, at the age of only twenty-one, as commissioner from Gov. Dinwiddie, to demand of the French forces their authority for invading the king's dominions? Who has not followed him a hundred times, with breathless anxiety, as he threads his way through that pathless wilderness, at one moment fired at by Indians at fifteen paces, at the next wrecked upon a raft amid snow and ice, and subjected throughout to every danger, which treacherous elements or still more treacherous enemies could involve? Who has forgotten his hardly less miraculous escape, a few years later, on the banks of the Monongahela, when, foremost in that fearful fight, he was the only mounted officer of the British troops who was not either killed or desperately wounded?
Let me not speak of Washington as a merely self-made man. There were influences employed in moulding and making him, far, far above his own control. Bereft of his father at the tender age of eleven years, he had a mother left, to whom the world can never over-estimate its debt. And higher, holier still, was the guardianship
