oftener, to a congregation which numbered Washington among its members.  Thereupon he published himself in his book as the rector of Mount Vernon parish.  There was, to begin with, no such parish.  There was Truro parish, in which was a church called indifferently Pohick or Mount Vernon church.  Of this church Washington was a vestryman until 1785, when he joined the church at Alexandria.  The Rev. Lee Massey was the clergyman of the Mount Vernon church, and the church at Alexandria had nothing to do with Mount Vernon.  There never was, moreover, such a person as the rector of Mount Vernon parish, but it was the Weems way of treating his appearance before the great man, and of deceiving the world with the notion of an intimacy which the title implied.

Weems, of course, had no difficulty with the public life, but in describing the boyhood he was thrown on his own resources, and out of them he evolved the cherry-tree, the refusal to fight or permit fighting among the boys at school, and the initials in the garden.  This last story is to the effect that Augustine Washington planted seeds in such a manner that when they sprouted they formed on the earth the initials of his son’s name, and the boy being much delighted thereby, the father explained to him that it was the work of the Creator, and thus inculcated a profound belief in God.  This tale is taken bodily from Dr. Beattie’s biographical sketch of his son, published in England in 1799, and may be dismissed at once.  As to the other two more familiar anecdotes there is not a scintilla of evidence that they had any foundation, and with them may be included the colt story, told by Mr. Custis, a simple variation of the cherry-tree theme, which is Washington’s early love of truth.  Weems says that his stories were told him by a lady, and “a good old gentleman,” who remembered the incidents, while Mr. Custis gives no authority for his minute account of a trivial event over a century old when he wrote.  To a writer who invented the rector of Mount Vernon, the further invention of a couple of Boswells would be a trifle.  I say Boswells advisedly, for these stories are told with the utmost minuteness, and the conversations between Washington and his father are given as if from a stenographic report.  How Mr. Custis, usually so accurate, came to be so far infected with the Weems myth as to tell the colt story after the Weems manner, cannot now be determined.  There can be no doubt that Washington, like most healthy boys, got into a good deal of mischief, and it is not at all impossible that he injured fruit-trees and confessed that he had done so.  It may be accepted as certain that he rode and mastered many unbroken thoroughbred colts, and it is possible that one of them burst a blood-vessel in the process and died, and that the boy promptly told his mother of the accident.  But this is the utmost credit which these two anecdotes can claim.  Even so much as this cannot be said of certain other improving tales of like nature.  That Washington lectured his playmates on the wickedness of fighting, and in the year 1754 allowed himself to be knocked down in the presence of his soldiers, and thereupon begged his assailant’s pardon for having spoken roughly to him, are stories so silly and so foolishly impossible that they do not deserve an instant’s consideration.