eorge Washington never knelt in the snow at Valley Forge with his cocked hat resting beside him and a shaft of light breaking through the trees. Historians who have spent careers on the man say so plainly. Thomas Tweed, professor emeritus at Notre Dame, has traced the image to a story invented by Mason Locke Weems, the same early biographer who gave America the cherry tree. Weems never witnessed anything himself. He wrote up an account from a secondhand source, a Quaker named