BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH xlvii 



lay about and, on a high plateau, skirted the walls of an 

 abandoned Federal stockade and signal tower. The boys — a 

 young Tyson became his inseparable friend — found the wooden 

 scaffold, rising with its zigzag flights of steps from landing- 

 place to landing-place above the brushwood beneath, a won- 

 derful place for observation. One could see the whole country 

 spread out like a map, the long indigo rampart of the Blue 

 Ridge hemming it in, the truncated top of Sugar Loaf looming 

 up in Maryland, — and lastly the sky and the stars ! This was 

 the very spot for using the atlas of the heavens from the 

 Gantts' attic at Strawberry Vale. A little practice brought 

 out the crying need of a telescope. Fairfax County, as far as 

 the boys knew, did not contain a telescope. No parent was 

 willing to invest money in one. There was nothing for it but 

 to earn it, which was an easy matter in harvest time when 

 a water-boy is an absolute necessity. The necessary amount 

 was earned and hoarded gradually ; a lengthy correspondence 

 with a Philadelphia firm opened, and at last news came that 

 the precious instrument had arrived in Georgetown, — it could 

 not be sent by express to Lewinsville. But it came on Satur- 

 day, — that meant an unendurable wait until Monday and 

 the impatient owners could not wait. They walked to George- 

 town, ten miles there and back, arriving home in the middle 

 of the night, too triumphant in possession of the telescope 

 to mind the necessary interview with anxious parents ; for of 

 course they had walked without asking the leave they knew 

 they could not get. 



Miss Tyson's school was soon outgrown and, as public 

 education was just struggling into existence in those days in 

 Fairfax, a medley of teachers, more or less competent, suc- 

 ceeded one another on the platform in the one-room school 

 house at Lewinsville. The two who had most influence on 

 Andrew and did much toward developing his bent were, as it 

 happened, Germans, — a certain Julius Golding and an Aus- 

 trian ex-army officer, Augustus von Degen. They saw at 

 once that the boy had abilities above the average and a rather 

 surprising range of knowledge, and singling him out among 

 the score of lads to whom books were an unavoidable evil, 

 they grounded him in Latin, Greek and mathematics. They 

 took considerable pains with his literary studies and Golding 

 found that Andrew had a gift for drawing which, if his in- 



