plain and practical. He never attempted the learned languages, nor
manifested any inclination for rhetoric or belles-lettres. His object, or
the object of his friends, seems to have been confined to fitting him for
ordinary business. His manuscript school books still exist, and are models
of neatness and accuracy. One of them, it is true, a ciphering book,
preserved in the library at Mount Vernon, has some school-boy attempts at
calligraphy; nondescript birds, executed with a flourish of the pen, or
profiles of faces, probably intended for those of his schoolmates; the rest
are all grave and business-like. Before he was thirteen years of age he had
copied into a volume forms for all kinds of mercantile and legal papers;
bills of exchange, notes of hand, deeds, bonds, and the like. This early
self-tuition gave him throughout life a lawyer's skill in drafting
documents, and a merchant's exactness in keeping accounts; so that all the
concerns of his various estates; his dealings with his domestic stewards
and foreign agents; his accounts with government, and all his financial
transactions are to this day to be seen posted up in books, in his own
handwriting, monuments of his method and unwearied accuracy.

He was a self-disciplinarian in physical as well as mental matters, and
practised himself in all kinds of athletic exercises, such as running,
leaping, wrestling, pitching quoits and tossing bars. His frame even in
infancy had been large and powerful, and he now excelled most of his
playmates in contests of agility and strength. As a proof of his muscular
power, a place is still pointed out at Fredericksburg, near the lower
ferry, where, when a boy, he flung a stone across the Rappahannock. In
horsemanship too he already excelled, and was ready to back, and able to
manage the most fiery steed. Traditional anecdotes remain of his
achievements in this respect.

Above all, his inherent probity and the principles of justice on which he