Washington was the first President of the United States, and the son of a Virginia planter.  He attended school until about sixteen years of age, was engaged in surveying, 1748-51, became an officer in the Continental army, and President in 1789.  He was re-elected in 1793.  He was preeminent for his sound judgment and perfect self-control.  It is said that no act of his public life can be traced to personal caprice, ambition, or resentment.

=THE BOYHOOD OF WASHINGTON=

BY HORACE E. SCUDDER

It was near the shore of the Potomac River, between Pope’s Creek and Bridge’s Creek, that Augustine Washington lived when his son George was born.  The land had been in the family ever since Augustine’s grandfather, John Washington, had bought it, when he came over from England in 1657.  John Washington was a soldier and a public-spirited man, and so the parish in which he lived—­for Virginia was divided into parishes as some other colonies into townships—­was named Washington.  It is a quiet neighborhood; not a sign remains of the old house, and the only mark of the place is a stone slab, broken and overgrown with weeds and brambles, which lies on a bed of bricks taken from the remnants of the old chimney of the house.  It bears the inscription: 

Here
The 11th of February, 1732 (old style)
George Washington
was born

[Illustration:  SLAB THAT MARKS THE LOCATION OF THE HOUSE WHERE WASHINGTON WAS BORN]

The English had lately agreed to use the calendar of Pope Gregory, which added eleven days to the reckoning, but people still used the old style as well as the new.  By the new style, the birthday was February 22, and that is the day which is now observed.  The family into which the child was born consisted of the father and mother, Augustine and Mary Washington, and two boys, Lawrence and Augustine.  These were sons of Augustine Washington and a former wife who had died four years before.  George Washington was the eldest of the children of Augustine and Mary Washington; he had afterward three brothers and two sisters, but one of the sisters died in infancy.

It was not long after George Washington’s birth that the house in which he was born was burned, and as his father was at the time especially interested in some iron-works at a distance, it was determined not to rebuild upon the lonely place.  Accordingly Augustine Washington removed his family to a place which he owned in Stafford County, on the banks of the Rappahannock River opposite Fredericksburg.  The house is not now standing, but a picture was made of it before it was destroyed.  It was, like many Virginia houses of the day, divided into four rooms on a floor, and had great outside chimneys at either end.

Here George Washington spent his childhood.  He learned to read, write, and cipher at a small school kept by Hobby, the sexton of the parish church.  Among his playmates was Richard Henry Lee, who was afterward a famous Virginian.  When the boys grew up, they wrote to each other of grave matters of war and state, but here is the beginning of their correspondence, written when they were nine years old.