boy, eager to earn his living and make his way in the world, would, like many others before him, look longingly to the sea as the highway to fortune and success.  To Washington the romance of the sea was represented by the tobacco-ship creeping up the river and bringing all the luxuries and many of the necessaries of life from vaguely distant countries.  No doubt he wished to go on one of these vessels and try his luck, and very possibly the royal navy was hoped for as the ultimate result.  The effort was certainly made to send him to sea, but it failed, and he went back to school to study more mathematics.

Apart from the fact that the exact sciences in moderate degree were about all that Mr. Williams could teach, this branch of learning had an immediate practical value, inasmuch as surveying was almost the only immediately gainful pursuit open to a young Virginia gentleman, who sorely needed a little ready money that he might buy slaves and work a plantation.  So Washington studied on for two years more, and fitted himself to be a surveyor.  There are still extant some early papers belonging to this period, chiefly fragments of school exercises, which show that he already wrote the bold, handsome hand with which the world was to become familiar, and that he made geometrical figures and notes of surveys with the neatness and accuracy which clung to him in all the work of his life, whether great or small.  Among those papers, too, were found many copies of legal forms, and a set of rules, over a hundred in number, as to etiquette and behavior, carefully written out.  It has always been supposed that these rules were copied, but it was reserved apparently for the storms of a mighty civil war to lay bare what may have been, if not the source of the rules themselves, the origin and suggestion of their compilation.  At that time a little volume was found in Virginia bearing the name of George Washington in a boyish hand on the fly-leaf, and the date 1742.  The book was entitled, “The Young Man’s Companion.”  It was an English work, and had passed through thirteen editions, which was little enough in view of its varied and extensive information.  It was written by W. Mather, in a plain and easy style, and treated of arithmetic, surveying, forms for legal documents, the measuring of land and lumber, gardening, and many other useful topics, and it contained general precepts which, with the aid of Hale’s “Contemplations,” may readily have furnished the hints for the rules found in manuscript among Washington’s papers.[1] These rules were in the main wise and sensible, and it is evident they had occupied deeply the boy’s mind.[2] They are for the most part concerned with the commonplaces of etiquette and good manners, but there is something not only apt but quite prophetic in the last one, “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.”  To suppose that Washington’s character was formed by these sententious bits of not very profound wisdom