t gratefully and respectfully declined it, jealously
maintaining the satisfaction of having served his country at the
sacrifice of his private interests.

As spring advanced, Mount Vernon, as had been anticipated, began to
attract numerous visitors. They were received in the frank,
unpretending style Washington had determined upon. It was truly
edifying to behold how easily and contentedly he subsided from the
authoritative commander-in-chief of armies into the quiet country
gentleman. There was nothing awkward or violent in the transition. He
seemed to be in his natural element. Mrs. Washington, too, who
presided with quiet dignity at head-quarters, and cheered the wintry
gloom of Valley Forge with her presence, presided with equal amenity
and grace at the simple board of Mount Vernon. She had a cheerful good
sense that always made her an agreeable companion, and was an
excellent manager.

In entering upon the out-door management of his estate, Washington was
but doing in person what he had long been doing through others. He had
never virtually ceased to be the agriculturist. Throughout all his
campaigns he had kept himself informed of the course of rural affairs
at Mount Vernon. By means of maps on which every field was laid down
and numbered, he was enabled to give directions for their several
cultivation, and receive accounts of their several crops. No hurry of
affairs prevented a correspondence with his overseer or agent, and he
exacted weekly reports. Thus his rural were interwoven with his
military cares; the agriculturist was mingled with the soldier.

The Fairfaxes, the kind friends of his boyhood, and social companions
of his riper years, were no longer at hand to share his pleasures and
lighten his cares. There were no more hunting dinners at Belvoir.
George William Fairfax, its former possessor, was in England; his
political principles had detained him there during the war, and part
of his property had been sequestered. Old Lord Fairfax, the Nimrod of
Greenway Court, Washington's early friend and patron, with whom he had
first learned to follow the hounds, had lived on in a green old age at
his sylvan retreat in the beautiful valley of the Shenandoah; popular
with his neighbors and unmolested by the Whigs, although frank and
open in his adherence to Great Britain. He had attained his
ninety-second year, when tidings of the surrender of Yorktown wounded
the national pride of the old cavalier to the quick,