A practical carpenter and smith, he brought the same quiet intelligence and firm will to the forging of iron or the felling and sawing of trees that he had displayed in fighting France.

The life of a country gentleman did not dull or stupefy him, or lead him to gross indulgences.

He remained well-made and athletic, strong and enduring, keen in perception and in sense, and warm in his feelings and affections.

Many men would have become heavy and useless in these years of quiet country life, but Washington simply ripened, and, like all slowly maturing men, grew stronger, abler, and wiser in the happy years of rest and waiting which intervened between youth and middle age.
Meantime, while the current of daily life flowed on thus gently at Mount Vernon, the great stream of public events poured by outside.

It ran very calmly at first, after the war, and then with a quickening murmur, which increased to an ominous roar when the passage of the Stamp Act became known in America.