choosing the perils and hardships of the wilderness; as we follow him
fording swollen streams, climbing rugged mountains, breasting the forest
storms, wading through snowdrifts, sleeping in the open air, living upon
the coarse food of hunters and of Indians, we trace with devout
admiration the divinely appointed education he was receiving to enable
him to meet and endure the fatigues, exposures, and privations of the
War of Independence.

Soon he was called to a more public sphere of action; and we again,
follow him in his romantic adventures as he travels the far-off
wilderness, a special messenger to the French commander on the Ohio, and
afterwards, when he led forth the troops of Virginia in the same
direction, or accompanied the ill-starred Braddock to the blood-stained
banks of the Monongahela. Everywhere we see the hand of God conducting
him into danger, that he might extract from it the wisdom of an
experience not otherwise to be obtained, and develop those heroic
qualities by which alone danger and difficulty can be surmounted; but
all the while covering him with a shield.

When we think of him, at midnight and in midwinter, thrown from a frail
raft into the deep and angry waters of a wide and rushing Western river,
thus separated from his only companion through the wilderness with no
aid for miles and leagues about him, buffeting the rapid current and
struggling through driving cakes of ice; when we behold the stealthy
savage, whose aim against all other marks is unerring, pointing his
rifle deliberately at him, and firing over and over again; when we see
him riding through showers of bullets on Braddock's fatal field, and
reflect that never, during his whole life, was he ever wounded, or even
touched by a hostile force--do we not feel that he was guarded by an
unseen hand, warding off every danger? No peril by flood or field was