Washingtons Birthday | Page 9

thy banners their tribute shall bring While rolls the Potomac where Washington slumbers, And his natal day comes with the angels of spring. We follow thy counsels, O hero eternal! To highest achievement thy school leads the van, And, crowning thy brow with the evergreen vernal, We pledge thee our all to the service of man!
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WASHINGTON-MONTH[7]
BY WILL CARLETON
February--February-- How your moods and actions vary Or to seek or shun! Now a smile of sunlight lifting, Now in chilly snowflakes drifting; Now with icy shuttles creeping Silver webs are spun. Now, with leaden torrents leaping, Oceanward you run, Now with bells you blithely sing, 'Neath the stars or sun; Now a blade of burdock bring To the suffering one; February--you are very Dear, when all is done: Many blessings rest above you, You one day (and so we love you) Gave us Washington.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] By permission of the author.

II
EARLY YEARS
A GLIMPSE OF WASHINGTON'S BIRTHPLACE
BY GRACE B. JOHNSON
From The Christian Endeavor World Seldom visited and almost unknown is the Wakefield Farm in Virginia, the birthplace of our first President. Recent attempts have been made to popularize the place, but there is little to attract the ordinary traveler; and its distance from a city makes excursions impracticable.
Lying on the Potomac River, about seventy miles below the city of Washington, one edge of the estate reaches down a steep, wooded bank to dip into the water, while, stretching back, it rambles on in grassy meadows and old stubble-fields to the corn-lands and orchards of the adjoining plantations. Skirting the land on one side is Pope's Creek, formerly Bridges' Creek, which in Washington's time was used as the main approach to the estate. On this side there is an easy, undulating slope; but this entrance has been abandoned. Only at high tide can small boats enter the creek, and another way had to be adopted. An iron pier nearly two miles away has been built, and is the landing-place for large and small craft.
All is quiet here now. There is only the rustle of the leaves, the drowsy hum of insects, and the interrupted discourse of the preacher-bird in the clump of trees near which stood the first home of Washington, to break the stillness on a summer day. No one lives here. Indeed, no one has lived here since the fire which destroyed the house and negro cabins, in Washington's boyhood. But here the baby life was spent, in the homestead founded by his great-grandfather, John Washington, who came from England in 1657.
Only a heap of broken bits grown over with catnip showed the place of the great brick chimney the first time I visited the farm; and the second time these, too, were gone. Now a plain, graceful shaft, bearing the simple inscription, "Washington's Birthplace," and below, "Erected by the United States, A.D. 1895," marks the place.
From the monument through the trees, can be seen the gleaming river, rippling its way silently to the bay, and over all rests the same brooding sense of peace and quietness which one feels at Mt. Vernon or at Arlington, the city of our nation's dead.
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SOMETHING OF GEORGE WASHINGTON'S BOYHOOD
ANONYMOUS
From The Evangelist George Washington was born at a time when savagery had just departed from the country, leaving freshness and vigor behind. The Indian had scarcely left the woods, and the pirate the shore near his home. His grandfather had seen his neighbor lying tomahawked at his door-sill, and his father had helped to chase beyond the mountains the whooping savages that carried the scalps of his friends at their girdle. The year his brother was born, John Maynard's ship had sailed up the James River with the bloody head of Blackbeard hanging to the bowsprit.
He had only one uncle, a brother Lawrence, and a cousin Augustine, all older than he, but the youngest of his older brothers was twelve years of age when George was born, while his cousin Augustine was only four years older, and his cousin Lawrence six years older than himself. When he was seven years old his sister Betty was a little lass of six. Two brothers, Samuel and John, were nearing their fourth and fifth birthdays. Charles, his baby brother, was still in his nurse's arms. Early the shadow of death crossed his boyish path, for his baby sister, Mildred, born soon after he was seven, died before he was nine.
The first playmate Washington had, out of his own immediate family, was another Lawrence Washington, a very distant cousin, who lived at Chotauk on the Potomac, and who, with his brother, Robert Washington, early won Washington's regard, and kept it through life. When Washington made his will he remembered them, writing, "to the acquaintances and friends of my juvenile years, Lawrence Washington and Robert