On this October afternoon, about three o’clock, a boy with a gun on his shoulder and a dog at his heels, came noiselessly out of the woods and walked up to the top of the knoll. The day was peculiarly still; but only the quickest ear could have detected the faint sound the boy made, as with a quick and graceful step he marched up the hill--for George Washington was a natural woodsman from his young boyhood, and he had early learned how to make his way through forest and field without so much as alarming the partridge on her nest. No art or craft of the woods, whether of white man or Indian, was unknown to him; and he understood Nature, the mighty mother, in all her civilized and uncivilized moods.