retreats and rugged wilds he learned, a few
years later, his first hard lessons in the art of war.

With all its privations, it was a life he loved to lead; for it
afforded him the means of an independent support: and a happy boy was
he, when first he wrote his mother that he was earning from fifteen
to twenty dollars for every day he worked. Besides this, the beauty
and grandeur of Nature's works, everywhere visible around him,
awakened in him feelings of the truest delight; and he would sometimes
spend the better part of a summer's day in admiring the tall and
stately trees, whose spreading branches were his only shelter from the
dews of heaven, and heat of noonday. At night, after supper, when his
companions would be talking over the adventures of the day just past,
or laughing boisterously at some broad joke repeated for the hundredth
time, or would be joining their voices in the chorus of some rude
woodland song, our young surveyor would be sitting a little apart on
the trunk of a fallen tree, pencil and paper before him, calculating
with a grave countenance, and by the ruddy light of a blazing
pine-knot, the results of the day's labor. With no other companionship
than that of the wild Indians he fell in with from time to time, and
the rude, unlettered hunters around him, he must needs turn for
society to the thoughts that stirred within his own mind. Often would
he withdraw himself from the noisy mirth of his companions, and,
climbing to some lofty mountain-top, spend hours and hours rapt in the
contemplation of the wild and varied region, smiling in life and
beauty far, far beneath him. At such times, we can imagine his
countenance lit up with a sacred joy, and his soul rising in praise
and thanksgiving to the great Father, who, in love and wisdom, made
this glorious world for the good and happiness of all that dwell
therein.

Now and then, for the sake of a refreshing change, he would leave the
wilderness behind him, with all its toils and dangers, and betake him
to Greenway Court, the woodland home of old Lord Fairfax, with whom he
had become a great favorite, and was ever a welcome guest. Here he
would spend a few weeks in the most agreeable manner you can well
imagine; for the old lord, being a man of some learning and extensive
reading, had collected, in the course of a long life, a large library
of the best and rarest books, from which, during these three years,
George derived great pleasure and much valu