whether he ever received any instruction
in the grammar of his own language; and although, when the French
officers under Rochambeau were in America, he attempted to acquire their
language, it appears to have been without success. From his thirteenth
year he evinced a turn for mastering the forms of deeds, constructing
diagrams, and preparing tabular statements. His juvenile manuscripts
have been preserved; the handwriting is neat, but stiff. During the last
summer he was at school, he surveyed the fields adjoining the
school-house and the surrounding plantations, entering his measurements
and calculations in a respectable field-book. He compiled about the same
time, from various sources, "Rules of Behavior in Company and
Conversation." Some selections in rhyme appear in his manuscripts, but
the passages were evidently selected for the moral and religious
sentiments they express, not from any taste for poetry. When a boy he
was fond of forming his school-mates into companies, who paraded and
fought mimic battles, in which he always commanded one of the parties.
He cultivated with ardor all athletic exercises. His demeanor and
conduct at school are said to have won the deference of the other boys,
who were accustomed to make him the arbiter of their disputes.

From the time of his leaving school till the latter part of 1753,
Washington was unconsciously preparing himself for the great duties he
had afterward to discharge. An attempt made to have him entered in the
Royal Navy, in 1746, was frustrated by the interposition of his mother.
The winter of 1748-49 he passed at Mount Vernon, then the seat of his
brother Lawrence, in the study of mathematics and the exercise of
practical surveying. George was introduced about this time to the family
of Lord Fairfax, his brother having married the daughter of William
Fairfax, a member of the Colonial Council, and a distant relative of
that nobleman. The immense tracts of wild lands belonging to Lord
Fairfax, in the valley of the Alleghany Mountains, had never been
surveyed; he had formed a favorable estimate of the talents of young
Washington, and intrusted the task to him. His first essay was on some
lands situated on the south branch of the Potomac, seventy miles above
its junction with the main branch. Although performed in an almost
impenetrable country, while winter yet lingered in the valleys, by a
youth who had only a month before completed his sixteenth year, it gave
so mu