If you have read Abe Lincoln: Frontier Boy or Ben Franklin: Printer's Boy or Andy Jackson: Boy Soldier you know how wonderfully interesting Augusta Stevenson can make the story of the boyhood of a famous American.

Now she employs her delightful gift to tell about the boyhood of the greatest of all Americans.

It was a very different world from ours in which George Washington grew up with his little sister Betty and his three younger brothers. On his father's plantation in Virginia there were a hundred slaves, some to keep the big house in order, some to care for the tobacco crop, others to run the shops—the tannery, the smokehouse, the smithy, the carpenter's, the shoemaker's, the dyer's.

George was interested in all that went on and tried to learn as much as he could. He fared well at Master Hobby's school, except with his spelling lessons. George was no speller.

He was a natural leader, handsome and strong, could run faster, swim farther, jump higher than the other boys, and was always fair and square. When there was news of border warfare with the Indians, George formed a company of the boys at school, drilled them with cornstalks. Some of the boys got hurt in a sham battle and George was punished for it. Then he wished he had cut down all the cherry trees.

George had courage. He showed it when the hunters wanted to kill the pet fox of his little friend Rastus.

His half-brother Lawrence insisted that he enter the merchant marine. Fortunately for America his mother prevented it. For a while he ran a ferry boat across the Rappahannock River, and one night he helped a runaway slave to escape.

George had learned surveying at school. When he was sixteen he surveyed Lawrence's property at Mount Vernon on the Potomac so well that Lord Fairfax asked him to survey his six-million-acre tract of land. It was wild country and many Indians roamed it. George did his job to perfection and showed that he could handle a group of hostile Indians successfully.

So he came into manhood, a great gentleman, a good scholar, a hard worker, an able and honorable man. By the simplest and most telling means Miss Stevenson paints the picture of the world he lived in and makes him a real boy. We understand now how natural it was for this boy leader to become the great leader of men and the Father of his Country.

From the dust jacket