His look was terrible. He put
his right hand on the muzzle, his left hand on the breach; he pulled
with this, he pushed with that, and wheeled it round, as if it had been
a plaything. It furrowed the ground like a ploughshare. He tore the
sheet-lead from the touch-hole; then the powder-monkey rushed up with
the fire, when the cannon went off, making the bark fly from the trees,
and many an Indian send up his last yell and bite the dust."
Yet this resourceful officer, fighting almost single-handed against
certain defeat, was then only a young man a few months past twenty-one.
He was displaying the same qualities which were later to make him the
commander-in-chief of a Revolution.
George Washington was a typical example of the born leader. He had
received no set military training save that which the stern necessity
of frontier life forced upon him. Yet at nineteen we find him no less
courageous and active when facing the enemy. He had been reared as a
farmer boy, with no other intention at first than the successful
management of his father's estates in Virginia. But boys in those days
had to learn to handle the rifle as readily as the plow, and Washington
was no exception to this rule.
Born in 1732 (every schoolboy knows the month and day) at Bridges
Creek, Virginia, his first home was a plain wooden farmhouse of
somewhat primitive pattern, with four rooms on the ground floor, and a
roomy attic covered by a long, sloping roof.
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