Found Richard Stephens hard at work with an ax--very extraordinary this!" To what extent the change proved permanent we do not know.

But even though the reformation was absolute, it mattered little, for each year produces a new crop of lazybones just as it does "lambs" and "suckers." Enough has been said to show that our Farmer was impatient, perhaps even a bit querulous, but innumerable incidents prove that he was also generous and just.

Thus when paper currency depreciated to a low figure he, of his own volition, wrote to Lund Washington that he would not hold him to his contract, but would pay his wages by a share in the crops, and this at a time when his own debtors were discharging their indebtedness in the almost worthless paper.
If ever a square man lived, Washington was that man.

He believed in the Golden Rule and he practiced it--not only in church, but in business.

It was not for nothing that as a boy he had written as his one hundred tenth "Rule of Civility": "Labor to keep alive in your Breast that Little Spark of Celestial fire called Conscience." In looking through his later letters I came upon one, dated January 7, 1796, from Pearce stating that Davenport, a miller whom Washington had brought from Pennsylvania, was dead.