His own imagination was very fertile,
and he really indulged the illusion that they were all he would have
liked them to be. His wife, her spirits broken down by poverty and care,
had long since ceased to make the best of the little left in her hands,
and her family government was also extremely nominal in its nature, so
that their arrival at Uncle Nathan's, to say the least of it, was not
a desirable affair. There were five children altogether. I believe it
would have been hard to find a worse boy than their eldest son Ephraim,
aged about fourteen. The next in age was George Washington, but I am
certain, had he lived in the days of that illustrious man, he would have
looked upon his namesake with any other feeling rather than pride.
Ephraim had one way, and George Washington had another. The eldest was
noisy and boisterous and delighted in malicious fun, and was continually,
as the neighbors said, "up to some kind of mischief;" while the other was
too indolent even to do mischief; he had one of those disagreeable sulky
natures which we sometimes meet with always grumbling and out of humor
with himself and every one else.
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