t Cousin Martha Washington several years before the
Revolution, at Mount Vernon. I had seen her while she was the widow of
Cousin Custis, and we occasionally corresponded. In those days we
visited by vessel, so a schooner of Robert Morris's father set me ashore
at Mount Vernon. Colonel Washington was then having his first portrait
painted by Wilson Peale, and he was forty years old. Peale and
Washington used to pitch the bar, play quoits, and fox-hunt, while
Cousin Martha, who was only three months younger than the colonel,
knitted and cut out sewing for her colored girls, and heard her
daughter, Martha Custis, play the harpsichord. Poor Martha had the
consumption; she was dark as an Indian; Washington often carried her
along the piazza and into the beautiful woodlands near the house; but
she died, leaving him all her money--nearly twenty thousand dollars. We
Custises rather looked down on Colonel Washington in those days; he was
not of the old gentry; his poor mother could barely read and write, and
once, when we went to Fredericksburg to see her, she was riding out in
the field among her few negroes as her own overseer, wearing an old
sun-bonnet, and sunburned like a forester."

"Dear me!" exclaimed Mrs. Custis. "I should think she was a great
impediment to Washington."

"I reckon that's the way her son got big," exclaimed Rhoda; "if his mar
had laid down in bed all day, he couldn't have killed King George so
easy with his swurd."

"I often said to Cousin Martha, 'What did you see in this big horse of a
man?' 'Oh,' she replied, 'he's the best overseer in Virginia. He looks
after my property as no other man could.'"

"Then," said Mrs. Custis, emphatically, "he was one man out of a
thousand."

"That's the kind of man you married, Vesta," spoke up Mrs. Dennis.

"_Her_ husband," said Mrs. Custis, "looked after her father's property,
I am sure, for he got it all."

"And returned it all," exclaimed Vesta.

Mrs. Custis remarked that Washington certainly was a blue-blooded man.

"Is thar people with blue blood comin' outen of 'em?" asked Rhoda
Holland. "Lord sakes! I should think it would make 'em cold."

"I wonder if men are ever great?" asked Vesta; "or whether it is not
great occasion and trial that project them. A crisis comes in our lives,
and, finding what we can endure, we incur greater risks, and finally
delight in such adventure."

"That is the way with my poor boy, Levin," said Mrs. Dennis, quietly, to