ng Wife of my happy Son, and a Loving
Daughter of

"Your affectionate Mother,

"M. WASHINGTON."

The marriage, it may be added here, sobered John Custis. He and his
bride established themselves at Abingdon on the Potomac, not far from
Mount Vernon, and with their little ones were often visitors, especially
when the General was away to the war and Mrs. Washington was alone.
Toward the close of the war Jack himself entered the army, rose to the
rank of colonel and died of fever contracted in the siege of Yorktown.
Thus again was the mother's heart made sorrowful, nor did the General
himself accept the loss unmoved. He at once adopted the two youngest
children, Eleanor and George Washington Parke, and brought them up in
his own family.

Eleanor Custis, or "Nelly," as she was affectionately called, grew up a
joyous, beautiful cultured girl, who won the hearts of all who saw her.
The Polish poet, Julian Niemcewicz, who visited Mount Vernon in 1798,
wrote of her as "the divine Miss Custis.... She was one of those
celestial beings so rarely produced by nature, sometimes dreamt of by
poets and painters, which one cannot see without a feeling of ecstacy."
As already stated, she married the General's nephew, Lawrence Lewis. In
September, 1799, Washington told the pair that they might build a house
on Grey's Heights on the Dogue Run Farm and rent the farm, "by all odds
the best and most productive I possess," promising that on his death the
place should go to them. Death came before the house was built, but
later the pair erected on the Heights "Woodlawn," one of the most
beautiful and pretentious places in Fairfax County.

George Washington Parke Custis grew up much such a boy as his father
was. He took few matters seriously and neglected the educational
opportunities thrown in his way. Washington said of him that "from his
infancy I have discovered an almost unconquerable disposition to
indolence in everything that did not tend to his amusements." But he
loved the boy, nevertheless, and late in life Custis confessed, "we have
seen him shed tears of parental solicitude over the manifold errors and
follies of our unworthy youth." The boy had a good heart, however, and
if he was the source of worry to the great man during the great man's
life, he at least did what he could to keep the great man's memory
green. He wrote a book of recollections full of filial affection and
Latin phrases and painted innumerable war pictures in w