I had known it,
was respectable, but not necessarily admirable. The people I really
admired, like my Uncle Solomon, and Cousin Rachel, were those who
preached the least and laughed the most. My sister Frieda was
perfectly good, but she did not think the less of me because I played
tricks. What I loved in my friends was not inimitable. One could be
downright good if one really wanted to. One could be learned if one
had books and teachers. One could sing funny songs and tell anecdotes
if one travelled about and picked up such things, like one's uncles
and cousins. But a human being strictly good, perfectly wise, and
unfailingly valiant, all at the same time, I had never heard or
dreamed of. This wonderful George Washington was as inimitable as he
was irreproachable. Even if I had never, never told a lie, I could not
compare myself to George Washington; for I was not brave--I was afraid
to go out when snowballs whizzed--and I could never be the First
President of the United States.

So I was forced to revise my own estimate of myself. But the twin of
my new-born humility, paradoxical as it may seem, was a sense of
dignity I had never known before. For if I found that I was a person
of small consequence, I discovered at the same time that I was more
nobly related than I had ever supposed. I had relatives and friends
who were notable people by the old standards,--I had never been
ashamed of my family,--but this George Washington, who died long
before I was born, was like a king in greatness, and he and I were
Fellow Citizens. There was a great deal about Fellow Citizens in the
patriotic literature we read at this time; and I knew from my father
how he was a Citizen, through the process of naturalization, and how I
also was a citizen, by virtue of my relation to him. Undoubtedly I was
a Fellow Citizen, and George Washington was another. It thrilled me to
realize what sudden greatness had fallen on me; and at the same time
it sobered me, as with a sense of responsibility. I strove to conduct
myself as befitted a Fellow Citizen.

Before books came into my life, I was given to stargazing and
daydreaming. When books were given me, I fell upon them as a glutton
pounces on his meat after a period of enforced starvation. I lived
with my nose in a book, and took no notice of the alternations of the
sun and stars. But now, after the advent of George Washington and the
American Revolution, I began to dream again. I strayed on the co