relics of the days when George was the
whole thing around there. We saw the bed on which George died, and then
we went down to the icehouse and looked through the fence and saw the
marble coffins in which George and Martha were sealed up. Say, old man,
I know you haven't got much reverence, but you couldn't look through
that fence at what remains of the father of his country without taking
off your hat and thinking good things while you were there.

[Illustration: Saw the marble coffins in which George and Martha 050]

I was surprised at dad; he cried, though he never met George Washington
in all his life. I have seen dad at funerals at home, when he was a
bearer, or a mourner, and he never acted as thought it affected him
much, but there at Mount Vernon, standing within eight feet of the
remains of George Washington, he just lost his nerve, and bellered, and
I felt solemn myself, like I had been kept in after school when all the
boys were going in swimming. If a negro had not asked dad for a quarter
I know dad would have got down on his knees and been pious, but when
he gave that negro a swift kick for butting in with a commercial
proposition, in a sacred moment, dad come to, and we went up to the
house again. Dad said what he wanted was to think of George Washington
just as a country farmer, instead of a general and a president. He said
we got nearer to George, if we thought of him getting up in the morning,
putting on his old farmer pants and shirt, and going downstairs in his
stocking feet, and going out to the kitchen by the wooden bench, dipping
a gourd full of rain water out of a barrel into an earthen wash basin
and taking some soft soap out of a dish and washing himself, his shirt
open so his great hairy breast would catch the breeze, his suspenders,
made of striped bed ticking, hanging down, his hair touseled up until
he had taken out a yellow pocket comb and combed it, and then yelling
to Martha to know about how long a workingman would have to wait for
breakfast. And then dad said he liked to think of George Washington
sitting down at the breakfast table and spearing sausages out of a
platter, and when a servant brought in a mess of these old-fashioned
buckwheat cakes, as big as a pieplate, see George, in imagination, pilot
a big one on to his plate, and cover it with sausage gravy, and eat
like he didn't have any dyspepsia, and see him help Martha to buckwheat
cakes, and finally get up from breakfast like