Canotocarius, "Destroyer of Villages," a title they afterward gave to George, his illustrious great-grandson. He died in 1677, leaving a great estate to his son Lawrence, who became the father of Captain Augustine Washington, who married Mary Ball, in 1730.

So George Washington, "the first American,' came into the world with a rare military heritage, in Church and in State, both in the Old World and the New.

CHAPTER II

THE LITTLE BOY WASHINGTON

THE PLACE AND THE DAY

CAPTAIN AUGUSTINE WASHINGTON brought Mary Ball, his beautiful young bride, home to "Wakefield," his own birthplace, a sightly estate overlooking the Potomac. The place had been settled by his grandfather, Colonel John Washington. The house was a rather dingy old story-and-a-half wooden structure built on a

brick foundation, with four large rooms on the ground floor, and several small bedrooms in the low half-story upstairs. It had a long slanting roof which came nearly down to the ground at the back, and outside, at each end, stood a huge, high chimney.

The little house was surrounded by a spacious garden, which sloped toward the tide-water river, so wide there as to be really an arm of Chesapeake Bay. The grounds abounded in fig and other fruit trees, laurel, and wild grapes, honeysuckle and sweetbrier roses which clambered and clustered over stones and stumps along the steep river bank. "Wakefield" was, all together, a beautiful estate.

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Augustine Washington was accounted wealthy man in his day. Aside from several plantations his father, Lawrence Washington, had left him, he had acquired others. He was an energetic man of affairs, and his various enterprises seemed to have been successful. He became a leading member of the Principio Company, a sort of syndicate of English adventurers, which operated certain iron mines in the colony.

In connection with this he had established a furnace on his estate in Stafford County, and

controlled the teaming of the ore from the mines. He was also master of a ship which carried the iron to the English market; from this he received the title of Captain. On his return trips his ship came loaded with household goods and supplies, farm implements and tools, carriages, wearing apparel, and even groceries, for nearly everything the planters used, or wore, or ate, had to be brought from the Mother Country. Sometimes he brought back gangs of convicts, condemned to work for years in the mines and tobacco fields, instead of serving their terms in prison.

The chief product of the soil of Virginia was tobacco. Therefore the principal occupation was growing, curing, and shipping tobacco, which Captain Washington was able to deliver from his own landing at "Wakefield," sometimes in his own ship, direct to the London market. Tobacco was not only the staple product but the currency of the colony, generally used instead of money. A slave, a coach, a cow, or a gown cost so many pounds-not dollars nor pounds sterling, as in England, but pounds of tobacco!

There were few cities in America in those

days. Even the greatest, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, would hardly be considered large towns to-day. Most of the people lived in the country, as farmers and planters, in the fertile valleys along the navigable rivers. Their homes were scattered so far apart that it was miles, usually, to their nearest neighbors. The country, a few miles back from these valleys, was an almost unbroken wilderness, generally forests, inhabited by savages, or rough, venturesome people speaking foreign tongues, and nearly as wild, or rude, as the Indians themselves.

As the planters could get about in boats to the distant villages, or visit their neighbors, there were very few roads of any kind, and none were what would be called good roads to-day. Yet many a family in Virginia made it a matter of pride and dignity to drive with an English "coach and four," though their heavy carriages of gilt and glass lumbered and jolted over roots, logs and stumps, and floundered through mudholes and swamps.

The aristocracy of Virginia, in that day, was said to be the proudest in the world. Among the famous "First Families of Virginia" (or

"F. F. V.'s") were the Lees, Masons, Byrds, Carys, and perhaps a few others. Despite the gentle lineage of the Washingtons, and the wealth and enterprise of Captain Augustine, they were looked upon as belonging to the "minor gentry," as those were called who were not of noble origin, but related to titled families in England. Besides, the Washingtons, like many of the planters, were "land poor." They owned large estates, but had little money to spend for luxuries and privileges. The men worked on their estates with their slaves and convicts whose servitude made all kinds of manual labor seem mean and low to those descendants of English noblemen.

As there were few good schools and colleges in America, Virginian youths were sent to England to be educated or "finished. Captain Washington himself had gone to school at Appleby, near Whitehaven, and he proposed to send his sons, Lawrence and young Augustine, to the same school as soon as they were old enough to take the studies and bear the long separation.

It was upon these strange, contrasting scenes that little George Washington opened his round