brother, George, her guardian. She was a sweet-natured girl, but very
frail, who died before long, probably of the same disease which
had carried her father off, and, until its infectious nature was
understood, used to decimate families from generation to generation.

To have thrust upon him, at the age of twenty, the management of a
large estate might seem a heavy burden for any young man; but George
Washington was equal to the task, and it seems as if much of his
career up to that time was a direct preparation for it. He knew every
foot of its fields and meadows, of its woodlands and streams; he knew
where each crop grew, and its rotation; he had taken great interest in
horses and cattle, and in the methods for maintaining and improving
their breed; and now, of course being master, his power of choosing
good men to do the work was put to the test. But he had not been long
at these new occupations before public duties drew him away from them.

Though they knew it not, the European settlers in North America were
approaching a life-and-death catastrophe. From the days when the
English and the French first settled on the continent, Fate ordained
for them an irrepressible conflict. Should France prevail? Should
England prevail? With the growth of their colonies, both the English
and the French felt their rivalry sharpened. Although distances often
very broad kept them apart in space, yet both nations were ready to
prove the terrible truth that when two men, or two tribes, wish
to fight each other, they will find out a way. The French, at New
Orleans, might be far away from the English at Boston; and the
English, in New York, or in Philadelphia, might be removed from the
French in Quebec; but in their hatreds they were near neighbors. The
French pushed westward along the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, and
from Lake Erie, they pushed southward, across the rich plains of Ohio,
to the Ohio River. Their trails spread still farther into the Western
wilderness. They set up trading-posts in the very region which the
English settlers expected to occupy in the due process of their
advance. At the junction of the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers, they
planted Fort Duquesne, which not only commanded the approach to the
territory through which the Ohio flowed westward, but served notice
on the English that the French regarded themselves as the rightful
claimants of that territory.

In 1753 Governor Dinwiddie, of Virginia, had sent a co