In catering to his mind, he did not neglect bodily skill either.  His early reading of Plutarch and other warlike works had filled him with desire to emulate the heroes of battle.  An old copy of Saviolo’s book on honour and fence, written in the reign of Elizabeth, or James, I forget which, had in some manner found its way to his father’s shelves; and from this Philip secretly obtained some correct ideas of swordsmanship.[2] Putting them in practice one day in the shop, with a stick, when he thought no one was looking, he suddenly heard a cry of “bravo” from the street door, and saw he was observed by a Frenchman, who had recently set up in Philadelphia as a teacher of fencing, dancing, and riding.  This expert, far from allowing Philip to be abashed, complimented and encouraged him; entered the shop, and made friends with him.  The lad, being himself as likable as he found the lively foreigner interesting, became in time something of a comrade to the fencing master.  The end of this was that, in real or pretended return for the loan of Saviolo’s book, the Frenchman gave Philip a course of instruction and practice in each of his three arts.

To these the boy added, without need of a teacher, the ability to shoot, both with gun and with pistol.  I suppose it was from being so much with his mother, between whom and himself there must have existed the most complete devotion, that notwithstanding his manly and scholarly accomplishments, his heart, becoming neither tough like the sportsman’s nor dry like the bookworm’s, remained as tender as a girl’s—­or rather as a girl’s is commonly supposed to be.  His mother’s death, due to some inward ailment of which the nature was a problem to the doctors, left him saddened but too young to be embittered.  And this was the Philip Winwood—­grave and shy from having been deprived too much of the company of other boys, but with certain mental and bodily advantages of which too much of that company would have deprived him—­who was taken into the house of the Faringfields in the Summer of 1763.

The footing on which he should remain there was settled the very morning after his arrival.  Mr. Faringfield, a rigid and prudent man, but never a stingy one, made employment for him as a kind of messenger or under clerk in his warehouse.  The boy fell gratefully into the new life, passing his days in and about the little counting-room that looked out on Mr. Faringfield’s wharf on the East River.  He found it dull work, the copying of invoices, the writing of letters to merchants in other parts of the world, the counting of articles of cargo, and often the bearing a hand in loading or unloading some schooner or dray; but as beggars should not be choosers, so beneficiaries should not be complainers, and Philip kept his feelings to himself.