Many times had I tried to get my Father to go out and stay overnight. But he wouldn't go. One time, though, I did not come home when I had promised, so Father rode out on Garnett to find me. Instead of my coming back with him he just unsaddled and turned Garnett loose in the woods and stayed overnight.

We gave him the big bunk with two red quilts, and he stuck it out. Next morning we had fried apples, ham and coffee for breakfast.

What there was about it I did not understand, but John was a very frequent visitor after that.

You know we called Father, John, because he said that wasn't his name.

He used to come up in the evening and would bring the Red One or Sammy the Artist or Saint Jerome the Sculptor. Once he brought Michael Monahan and John Sayles the Universalist preacher.

Mike didn't like it.

The field-mice running on the rafters overhead at night chilled his blood. He called them terrible beasts.

From then on we youngsters were gradually deprived of our freedom at camp. These visitors were too numerous for us and we had to seek other fields of adventure.

John got to going out to the camp to get away from visitors at the Shop. He found the place quiet and comforting. The woods gave him freedom to think and write. It so developed that he would spend about four days a month there, writing the "Little Journey" for the next month. How many of his masterpieces were written at the Camp I can not say, but for several years it was his Retreat and he used it constantly.

He reminded us boys several times when we kicked, that he had a good claim on it—for didn't he furnish the door and the window-frames?

I never suspected he would recognize them.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

GEORGE WASHINGTON

Dean Stanley has said that all the gods of ancient mythology were once men, and he traces for us the evolution of a man into a hero, the hero into a demigod, and the demigod into a divinity. By a slow process, the natural man is divested of all our common faults and frailties; he is clothed with superhuman attributes and declared a being separate and apart, and is lost to us in the clouds.

When Greenough carved that statue of Washington that sits facing the Capitol, he unwittingly showed how a man may be transformed into a Jove.

But the world has reached a point when to be human is no longer a cause for apology; we recognize that the human, in degree, comprehends the divine.

Jove inspires fear, but to Washington we pay the tribute of affection. Beings hopelessly separated from us are not ours: a god we can not love, a man we may. We know Washington as well as it is possible to know any man. We know him better, far better, than the people who lived in the very household with him. We have his diary showing "how and where I spent my time"; we have his journal, his account-books (and no man was ever a more painstaking accountant); we have hundreds of his letters, and his own copies and first drafts of hundreds of others, the originals of which have been lost or destroyed.

From these, with contemporary history, we are able to make up a close estimate of the man; and we find him human—splendidly human. By his books of accounts we find that he was often imposed upon, that he loaned thousands of dollars to people who had no expectation of paying; and in his last will, written with his own hand, we find him canceling these debts, and making bequests to scores of relatives; giving freedom to his slaves, and acknowledging his obligation to servants and various other obscure persons. He was a man in very sooth. He was a man in that he had in him the appetites, the ambitions, the desires of a man. Stewart, the artist, has said, "All of his features were indications of the strongest and most ungovernable passions, and had he been born in the forest, he would have been the fiercest man among savage tribes."

But over the sleeping volcano of his temper he kept watch and ward, until his habit became one of gentleness, generosity, and shining, simple truth; and, behind all, we behold his unswerving purpose and steadfast strength.

And so the object of this sketch will be, not to show the superhuman Washington, the Washington set apart, but to give a glimpse of the man Washington who aspired, feared, hoped, loved and bravely died.

The first biographer of George Washington was the Reverend Mason L. Weems. If you have a copy of Weems' "Life of Washington," you had better wrap it in chamois and place it away for your heirs, for some time it will command a price. Fifty editions of Weems' book were printed, and in its day no other volume approached it in point of popularity. In American literature, Weems stood first. To Weems are we indebted for the hatchet tale, the story of the colt that was broken and killed in the process, and all those other fine romances of Washington's youth. Weems' literary style reveals the very acme of that vicious quality of untruth to be found in the old-time Sunday-school books. Weems mustered all the "Little Willie" stories he could find, and attached to them Washington's name, claiming to write for "the Betterment of the Young," as if in dealing with the young we should carefully conceal the truth. Possibly Washington could not tell a lie, but Weems was not thus handicapped.

Under a mass of silly moralizing, he nearly buried the real Washington, giving us instead a priggish, punk youth, and a Madame Tussaud, full-dress general, with a wax-works manner and a wooden dignity.

Happily, we have now come to a time when such authors as Mason L. Weems and John S.C. Abbott are no longer accepted as final authorities. We do not discard them, but, like Samuel Pepys, they are retained that they may contribute to the gaiety of nations.

Various violent efforts have been made in days agone to show that Washington was of "a noble line"—as if the natural nobility of the man needed a reason—forgetful that we are all sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. But Burke's "Peerage" lends no light, and the careful, unprejudiced, patient search of recent years finds only the blood of the common people.

Washington himself said that in his opinion the history of his ancestors "was of small moment and a subject to which, I confess, I have paid little attention."

He had a bookplate and he had also a coat of arms on his carriage-door. The Reverend Mr. Weems has described Washington's bookplate thus: "Argent, two bar gules in chief, three mullets of the second. Crest, a raven with wings, indorsed proper, issuing out of a ducal coronet, or."

Mary Ball was the second wife of Augustine Washington. In his will the good man describes this marriage, evidently with a wink, as "my second Venture." And it is sad to remember that he did not live to know that his "Venture" made America his debtor. The success of the union seems pretty good argument in favor of widowers marrying. There were four children in the family, the