College, which was to be known thereafter as
Washington and Lee.

When Mary Custis became Mrs. Robert E. Lee there was some disparity in
their fortunes. She was the heiress of the Custis estate, while he was
drawing only the meager pay of a second lieutenant. But such was her
pride and confidence in him, that she turned her back on money and
decided to live on her husband's income. It was harsh training for a
time, but it fitted her to become a real helpmeet for him; and in the
rigorous days of the Civil War she was glad that she had learned early
to "do without."

One of Lieutenant Lee's first assignments in the engineering corps was
the construction of harbor defenses in Hampton Roads. As he labored to
make these as strong as possible, he little dreamed that it would be
his problem, a quarter of a century later, to study how he might
demolish them.

From Hampton Roads he was transferred to Washington, and made assistant
to the chief engineer--an agreeable change as it brought him close to
his wife's home. Mounted on a favorite steed he could easily "commute"
back and forth between office and home. On one occasion it is related
that he invited a brother officer, Captain Macomb, out home for the
night, and as the latter had no mount, Lee took him up behind himself,
and down Pennsylvania Avenue they went, saluting other officers whom
they encountered, with great glee. That was one time when a
commutation ticket was good for two.

Five years after graduation he had worked up to a first lieutenancy,
and two years more found him a captain. In 1835 he was appointed on a
commission to fix the boundary line between Michigan and Ohio. A few
months later he was detailed to make an important study of the
Mississippi River and Valley with a view to determining how to prevent
the annual overflows with their consequent damage to property. His
researches were chiefly along the upper river at Illinois. It is said
that while there he was struck with the enormous potential energy of
the current, and reported that if a dam were constructed at a certain
place, a great storehouse of power would be possible. This was long
before the day of the dynamo, by which such power could be harnessed.
Many years later, however, his dream came true, at the place he had
indicated,--the great power dam nearly a mile long blocking the "Father
of Waters" for the first time in his tumultuous career, at Keokuk, Iowa.

Farther down stream, a