patient at the request, and as
restive under the operation, as a colt is of the saddle. The next time I
submitted very reluctantly, but with less flouncing. Now, no dray-horse
moves more readily to his thills than I to the painter's chair." His aide,
Laurens, bears this out by writing of a miniature, "The defects of this
portrait are, that the visage is too long, and old age is too strongly
marked in it. He is not altogether mistaken, with respect to the languor
of the general's eye; for altho' his countenance when affected either by
joy or anger, is full of expression, yet when the muscles are in a state
of repose, his eye certainly wants animation."

[Illustration: FIRST (FICTITIOUS) ENGRAVED PORTRAIT OF WASHINGTON]

One portrait which furnished Washington not a little amusement was an
engraving issued in London in 1775, when interest in the "rebel General"
was great. This likeness, it is needless to say, was entirely spurious,
and when Reed sent a copy to head-quarters, Washington wrote to him, "Mrs.
Washington desires I will thank you for the picture sent her. Mr.
Campbell, whom I never saw, to my knowledge, has made a very formidable
figure of the Commander-in-chief, giving him a sufficient portion of
terror in his countenance."

The physical strength mentioned by nearly every one who described
Washington is so undoubted that the traditions of his climbing the walls
of the Natural Bridge, throwing a stone across the Rappahannock at
Fredericksburg, and another into the Hudson from the top of the Palisades,
pass current more from the supposed muscular power of the man than from
any direct evidence. In addition to this, Washington in 1755 claimed to
have "one of the best of constitutions," and again he wrote, "for my own
part I can answer, I have a constitution hardy enough to encounter and
undergo the most severe trials."

This vigor was not the least reason of Washington's success. In the
retreat from Brooklyn, "for forty-eight hours preceeding that I had hardly
been off my horse," and between the 13th and the 19th of June of 1777 "I
was almost constantly on horseback." After the battle of Monmouth, as told
elsewhere, he passed the night on a blanket; the first night of the siege
of York "he slept under a mulberry tree, the root serving for a pillow,"
and another time he lay "all night in my Great Coat & Boots, in a birth
not long enough for me by the head, & much cramped." Besides the physical
strain there was a