tained, to which the latter replied, with ready tact and naïveté: "When I put it up, I expected Mrs. Washington would have lived at home, if you did not; and was I to judge the future from the past consumption, there would have been a use for it, for I believe Mrs. Washington's charitable disposition increases in the same proportion with her meat house." To the logical excuses of his genial kinsman Washington made no reply, for, great general that he was, he was wise enough to appreciate the fact that in domestic matters he could not always be commander-in-chief.

As Martha Custis advanced toward womanhood she became interested in the good works that occupied so much of her mother's time, and the beautiful face of the "dark lady," as she was called, in consequence of her brunette complexion and dark eyes, was known and loved in many homes of sorrow and suffering. Washington was deeply attached to this lovely girl, whose gentleness and sweetness strongly appealed to his manly nature. It is evident that he realized, even if Mrs. Washington did not, the cloud that was soon to darken the sunshine of their happy home. In 1769, he wrote to Colonel Armstrong from the Warm Springs of Virginia, whither he had gone with Mrs. Washington and her daughter, "the lat

ter," he said, "being troubled with a complaint, which the efficacy of these waters it is thought might remove. The waters not proving of service, and the medical skill of that day being powerless to check the progress of the insidious malady, which seems, from all accounts, to have been consumption, Patsy Custis, as she was called, declined slowly but surely.

No picture of the Washingtons in their home would be complete without some mention of the sincere religious feeling that characterized their private and public life. Washington was a vestryman at Christ Church, Alexandria, and in Truro Parish, in the rebuilding of whose church he had taken an active interest. This latter church, Pohick, being within easy distance of Mount Vernon, was usually attended by the Washington family. During the war this church seems to have fallen into disuse, and after their return to their home, in 1783, General and Mrs. Washington attended Christ Church, Alexandria. That this couple combined active and systematic benevolence with their other religious duties is evident from the following directions sent by the General to his cousin Lund after Mrs. Washington's departure for Cambridge: "Let the hospitality of the house

Let no

with respect to the poor be kept up. one go hungry away. If any of this kind of people should be in want of corn, supply their necessaries, provided it does not encourage them to idleness; and I have no objection to your giving my money in charity to the amount of forty or fifty pounds a year where you think it well bestowed. What I mean by having no objection is, that it is my desire it should be done. You are to consider that neither myself nor wife, is now in the way to do those good offices."

V

THE SHADOW OF COMING EVENTS

INTO this old Virginia life, full of the pleasant stir of business and the genial exchange of visits and neighborly courtesies, there crept murmurs of discontent, low in the beginning, then louder and bolder. First came the Stamp Act, which pressed hard upon the planter of Virginia, as upon the farmer and merchant of Massachusetts, and upon the importer and manufacturer of Pennsylvania; then the voice of Patrick Henry as of a prophet crying in the wilderness, speedily followed by the dissolving of the Virginia House of Burgesses; then compromise, and that period of nearly ten. years when the cry was "Peace, peace; when there was no peace," for resistance was in the thoughts of men and war was in the air.

All these signs of the times were watched with eager interest by the little family at Mount Vernon, and were talked over at their hunts and dinners by Washington and his neighbors. Although he numbered among his

associates many advanced patriots, he had warm friends upon the other side of the question, among these Lord Fairfax and Bryan Fairfax, beside which he had always held pleasant unofficial relations with the several governors of the Colony.

When Richard Henry Lee, an old Westmoreland friend, and Edmund Pendleton and fiery young Patrick Henry and George Mason of Gunston Hall, author of the famous Bill of Rights, met the Fairfaxes around the dinner table at Mount Vernon, we can well believe that the debate ran high and lasted long. Many of these discussions naturally took place in Mrs. Washington's presence, and although an habitually quiet woman in company, taking no leading part in general conversation, "she treasured these things and pondered them in her heart;" and when the time came for action, was ready to take her stand.

George Mason prepared his non-importation agreements for Virginia at Washington's request; the latter laid them before the House of Burgesses, and thenceforth none of the articles taxed by the English government were imported for the Mount Vernon household. Although Arthur Lee wrote from London of the "increased orders for fineries" from the ladies of Williamsburg during the administra