t admirable parent for whatever of
success he achieved, he was not unlike Andrew Jackson and the majority
of the great men of the world. He wrote of her in his mature age as
follows: "And if, in my now protracted career, I have achieved
anything worthy of being written, anything that my countrymen are
likely to honor in the next century, it is from the lessons of that
admirable parent that I derived the inspiration."

In his seventh year he was ordered on a Sunday morning to get ready
for church. Disobeying the order, he ran off and concealed himself,
but was pursued, captured, and returned to his mother, who at once
sent for a switch. The switch was a limb from a Lombardy poplar, and
the precocious little truant, seeing this, quoted a verse from St.
Matthew which was from a lesson he had but recently read to his
mother. The quotation was as follows: "Every tree that bringeth not
forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire." The quotation
was so apt that the punishment was withheld, but the offender was not
spared a very wholesome lesson.

General Scott's mother, Ann, was the daughter of Daniel Mason and
Elizabeth Winfield, his wife, who was the daughter of John Winfield, a
man of high standing and large wealth. From his mother's family he
acquired his baptismal name of Winfield. John Winfield survived his
daughter, and dying intestate, in 1774, Winfield Mason acquired by
descent as the eldest male heir (the law of primogeniture then being
the law of Virginia) the whole of a landed estate and a portion of the
personal property. The principal part of this large inheritance was
devised to Winfield Scott, but, the devisee having married again and
had issue, the will was abrogated. The wife of Winfield Mason was the
daughter of Dr. James Greenway, a near neighbor. He was born in
England, near the borders of Scotland, and inherited his father's
trade, that of a weaver. He was ambitious and studious, and giving all
of his spare time to study, he became familiar with the Greek, Latin,
French, and Italian languages. After his immigration to Virginia he
prepared himself for the practice of medicine, and soon acquired a
large and lucrative practice. He devoted much of his time to botany,
and left a _hortus siccus_ of forty folio volumes, in which he
described the more interesting plants of Virginia and North Carolina.
He was honored by memberships in several of the learned European
societies, and was a correspondent o