n; but even in this I could not
continue far, for the jolting was so great, I was left upon the road with
a guard, and necessaries, to wait the arrival of Colonel Dunbar's
detachment which was two days' march behind us, the General giving me his
word of honor, that I should be brought up, before he reached the French
fort. This _promise_, and the doctor's _threats_, that, if I persevered
in my attempts to get on, in the condition I was, my life would be
endangered, determined me to halt for the above detachment." Immediately
upon his return from that campaign, he told a brother, "I am not able,
were I ever so willing, to meet you in town, for I assure you it is with
some difficulty, and with much fatigue, that I visit my plantations in the
Neck; so much has a sickness of five weeks' continuance reduced me."

On the frontier, towards the end of 1757, he was seized with a violent
attack of dysentery and fever, which compelled him to leave the army
and retire to Mount Vernon. Three months later he said, "I have never
been able to return to my command, ... my disorder at times returning
obstinately upon me, in spite of the efforts of all the sons of
Aesculapius, whom I have hitherto consulted. At certain periods I have
been reduced to great extremity, and have too much reason to apprehend
an approaching decay, being visited with several symptoms of such a
disease.... I am now under a strict regimen, and shall set out to-morrow
for Williamsburg to receive the advice of the best physician there. My
constitution is certainly greatly impaired, and ... nothing can retrieve
it, but the greatest care and the most circumspect conduct." It was in
this journey that he met his future wife, and either she or the doctor
cured him, for nothing more is heard of his approaching "decay."

In 1761 he was attacked with a disease which seems incidental to new
settlements, known in Virginia at that time as the "river fever," and a
hundred years later, farther west, as the "break-bone fever," and which,
in a far milder form, is to-day known as malaria. Hoping to cure it, he
went over the mountains to the Warm Springs, being "much overcome with the
fatigue of the ride and weather together. However, I think my fevers are a
good deal abated, although my pains grow rather worse, and my sleep
equally disturbed. What effect the waters may have upon me I can't say at
present, but I expect nothing from the air--this certainly must be
unwholesome. I purp