but never swerving from the
path of justice. With the fondness of a lover, he ordered fine clothes
for his wife from London.

After his death, Mrs. Washington destroyed all of his letters. There
is only one of them to be found which was written after their
marriage. It is in an old book, printed in New York in 1796, when the
narrow streets around the tall spire of Trinity were the centre of
social life, and the busy hum of Wall Street was not to be heard for
fifty years!

One may fancy a stately Knickerbocker stopping at a little bookstall
where the dizzy heights of the Empire Building now rise, or down near
the Battery, untroubled by the white cliff called "The Bowling Green,"
and asking pompously enough, for the _Epistles; Domestic,
Confidential, and Official, from General Washington_.

The pages are yellowed with age, and the "f" used in the place of the
"s", as well as the queer orthography and capitalisation, look strange
to twentieth-century eyes, but on page 56 the lover-husband pleads
with his lady in a way that we can well understand.

The letter is dated "June 24, 1776," and in part is as follows:

"MY DEAREST LIFE AND LOVE:--

"You have hurt me, I know not how much, by the insinuation
in your last, that my letters to you have been less frequent
because I have felt less concern for you.

"The suspicion is most unjust; may I not add, is most
unkind. Have we lived, now almost a score of years, in the
closest and dearest conjugal intimacy to so little purpose,
that on the appearance only, of inattention to you, and
which you might have accounted for in a thousand ways more
natural and more probable, you should pitch upon that single
motive which is alone injurious to me?

"I have not, I own, wrote so often to you as I wished and as
I ought.

"But think of my situation, and then ask your heart if I be
_without excuse_?

"We are not, my dearest, in circumstances the most favorable
to our happiness; but let us not, I beseech of you, make
them worse by indulging suspicions and apprehensions which
minds in distress are apt to give way to.

"I never was, as you have often told me, even in my better
and more disengaged days, so attentive to the little
punctillios of friendship, as it may be, became me; but my
heart tells me, there never was a moment in my life, since I
first knew you,