frigid courtesy, at which the honest gentleman chafed but did not care to
remonstrate; or a stinging sarcasm which he would break through as he
would burst through so many brambles on those hunting excursions in which
he and Harry Warrington rode so constantly together; while George,
retreating to his tents, read mathematics and French and Latin, or sulked
in his book-room.

Harry was away from home with some other sporting friends when Mr.
Washington came to pay a visit at Castlewood. He was so peculiarly
tender and kind to the mistress there, and received by her with such
special cordiality, that George Warrington's jealousy had well-nigh
broken out into open rupture. But the visit was one of adieu, as it
appeared. Major Washington was going on a long and dangerous journey,
quite to the western Virginia frontier and beyond it. The French had
been for some time past making inroads into our territory. The
government at home, as well as those of Virginia and Pennsylvania, were
alarmed at this aggressive spirit of the lords of Canada and Louisiana.
Some of our settlers had already been driven from their holdings by
Frenchmen in arms, and the governors of the British provinces were
desirous of stopping their incursions, or at any rate to protest against
their invasion.

We chose to hold our American colonies by a law that was at least
convenient for its framers. The maxim was, that whoever possessed the
coast had a right to all the territory in hand as far as the Pacific; so
that the British charters only laid down the limits of the colonies from
north to south, leaving them quite free from east to west. The French,
meanwhile, had their colonies to the north and south, and aimed at
connecting them by the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence, and the great
intermediate lakes and waters lying to the westward of the British
possessions. In the year 1748, though peace was signed between the two
European kingdoms, the colonial question remained unsettled, to be opened
again when either party should be strong enough to urge it. In the year
1753 it came to an issue on the Ohio River where the British and French
settlers met.

A company called the Ohio Company, having grants from the Virginia
government of lands along that river, found themselves invaded in their
settlement's by French military detachments, who roughly ejected the
Britons from their holdings. These latter applied for protection to Mr.
Dinwiddie, lieutenant governor