266 THE WILDERNESS HUNTER. 



highest of all as a man, he could never have 

 been what he was had he not taken delight in 

 feats of hardihood, of daring, and of bodily 

 prowess. He was strongly drawn to those 

 field sports which demand in their follower 

 the exercise of the manly virtues courage, 

 endurance, physical address. As a young man, 

 clad in the distinctive garb of the backwoods- 

 man, the fringed and tasselled hunting-shirt, 

 he led the life of a frontier surveyor ; and like 

 his fellow adventurers in wilderness explora- 

 tion and Indian campaigning, he was often 

 forced to trust to the long rifle for keeping his 

 party in food. When at his home, at Mount 

 Vernon, he hunted from simple delight in the 

 sport. 



His manuscript diaries, preserved in the 

 State Department at Washington, are full of 

 entries concerning his feats in the chase ; 

 almost all of them naturally falling in the 

 years between the ending of the French war 

 and the opening of the Revolutionary struggle 

 against the British, or else in the period sep- 

 arating his service as Commander-in-chief of 

 the Continental armies from his term of office 

 as President of the Republic. These entries 

 are scattered through others dealing with his 

 daily duties in overseeing his farm and mill, 

 his attendance at the Virginia House of 

 Burgesses, his journeys, the drill of the local 

 militia, and all the various interests of his 

 many-sided life. Fond though he was of 

 hunting, he was wholly incapable of the career 

 of inanity led by those who make sport, not a 



