“The contradictory acc’ts given of the Lands upon the Mississippi are really astonishing—­some speak of the Country as a terrestrial Paradise, whilst others represent it as scarce fit for anything but Slaves and Brutes.  I am well satisfied, however, from your description of it, that I have no cause to regret my disappointment:—­The acc’t of Lord Hillsborough’s sentiments of the Proclamation of 1763, I can view in no other light than as one, among many other proofs, of his Lordship’s malignant disposition towards us poor Americans, formed equally in malice, absurdity, and error; as it would have puzzled this noble Peer, I am persuaded, to have assigned any plausible reason in support of this opinion.

“As I do not know but I may shortly see you in Frederick, and assuredly shall before the Assembly, I shall add no more than that, it will always give me pleasure to see you at this place whenever it is convenient to you, and that with compliments to your good Mother I remain, D’r Sir, Y’r most Obed’t H’ble Serv’t,

    “G’o Washington.”

[Illustration:  The Capitol at Washington and carpenters’ hall, where the first colonial Congress met.]

This private note, discussing casually and curtly the great river of the West, and the minister who endeavored to make it a flumen clausum to the colonists, nearly equidistant in date between the Boston Tea-party and the meeting of the Assembly which called the first Continental Congress, has some public interest.  The West always possessed a peculiar attraction for Washington.  He explored it personally and through others, and lost no occasion of procuring detailed information in regard to its capabilities.  He acquired large bodies of land along the Ohio at different points, from its affluents at the foot of the Alleghany to the Great Kanawha and below.  Now we see him gazing farther, over the yet unreddened battle-grounds of Boone and Lewis, to the magnificent province France and Spain were carefully holding in joint trusteeship for the infant state he was to nurse.  The representative in the provincial legislature of a frontier county stretching from the Potomac to the Ohio, we may fancy him inspired, as he looked around from his post on the vertebral range of the continent, with “something of prophetic strain.”  If so, he was not long to have leisure for indulging it.  Within eighteen months his life’s work was to summon him eastward to the sea-shore.  The Dark and Bloody Ground must wait.  For its tillage other guess implements than the plough were preparing—­the same that beckoned him to Cambridge and the new century.