George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 3, 15th edition.

[468] able to write to a schoolboy friend, ‘Dear Richard, a

Chap. XXIV.}

doubloon is my constant gain every day, and sometimes six pistoles;’ ‘himself his own cook, having no

1748.

spit but a forked stick, no plate but a large chip;’

Washington's Diary, in Sparks's Washington, II 416-420.

roaming over spurs of the Alleghanies, and along the banks of the Shenandoah; alive to nature, and sometimes ‘spending the best of the day in admiring the trees and richness of the land;’ among skin-clad savages, with their scalps and rattles, or uncouth emigrants, ‘that would never speak English;’ rarely sleeping in a bed; holding a bearskin a splendid couch; glad of a resting-place for the night upon a little hay, straw, or fodder, and often camping in the forests, where the place nearest the fire was a happy luxury;—this stripling surveyor in the woods, with no companion but his unlettered associates, and no implements of science but his compass and chain, contrasted strangely with the imperial magnificence of the congress of Aix la Chapelle. And yet God had selected, not Kaunitz, nor Newcastle, not a monarch of the house of Hapsburg, nor of Hanover, but the Virginia stripling, to give an impulse to human affairs, and, as far as events can depend on an individual, had placed the rights and the destinies of countless millions in the keeping of the widow's son.