Читать книгу Washington the Soldier онлайн

14 страница из 123

ssss1

The boyhood and youth of George Washington were singularly in harmony with those aptitudes and tastes that shaped his entire life. He was not quite eight years of age when his elder brother, Lawrence, fourteen years his senior, returned from England where he had been carefully educated, and where he had developed military tastes that were hereditary in the family. Lawrence secured a captain’s commission in a freshly organized regiment, and engaged in service in the West Indies, with distinguished credit. His letters, counsels, and example inspired the younger brother with similar zeal. Irving says that “all his amusements took a military turn. He made soldiers of his school-mates. They had their mimic parades, reviews, and sham-fights. A boy named William Bustle, was sometimes his competitor, but George was commander-in-chief of the school.”

His business aptitudes were equally exact, methodical, and promising. Besides fanciful caligraphy, which appeared in manuscript school-books, wherein he executed profiles of his school-mates, with a flourish of the pen, as well as nondescript birds, Irving states that “before he was thirteen years of age, he had copied into a volume, forms of all kinds of mercantile and legal papers: bills of exchange, notes of hand, deeds, bonds, and the like.” “This self-tuition gave him throughout life a lawyer’s skill in drafting documents, and a merchant’s exactness in keeping accounts, so that all the concerns of his various estates, his dealings with his domestic stewards and foreign agents, his accounts with government, and all his financial transactions, are, to this day, monuments of his method and unwearied accuracy.”