him, and to this one the hero succumbed, in the same manly spirit in which he had battled with an earthly foe. Great suffering was crowded into the twenty-four hours' illness which served to prostrate that vigorous form, and to still that active brain; but he could look up, at the last, and say--"I am not afraid to die." December 14, 1799, was the day of his death, and the 18th of the same month saw him laid, by a weeping multitude, in the family vault at Mount Vernon; not the tomb in which his ashes now repose, but the old one, which he had been planning to rebuild, saying "Let that be done first, for perhaps I shall want it first." We have thus traced the Father of our Country through all his earthly Homes, to that quiet one by the side of the Potomac, the object of devout pilgrimage to millions yet unborn. One more Home there is for him, even in this changing world--that which he possesses in the hearts of his countrymen, one which we cannot picture or describe, but from which he can never be displaced by the superior merit of mortal man. Other heroes may arise, will arise, as the world shall need them, exponents of their times and incarnations of the highest spirit of the race from which they spring; but America can have but one Washington--one man in whom the peculiar virtues of the _American_ character found their embodiment and their triumph. In saying this we may well be proud but not vainglorious. If the great truth it implies be not yet known and read of all men, we should be humbled by the thought that we are so slow to follow our immortal leader. Washington's indomitable spirit of freedom, as evident when at nineteen he withstood the English governor, as when in 1774 he "went to church and fasted all day," in sympathy with the people of Boston, in their resolution against the Port Bill; his self-control, the perfection of which made his fierce passions the sworn servants of virtue; his humanity, which no personal suffering or fatigue could blunt, and no provocation extinguish; his manly temper, never daunted by insolence or turned into arrogance by triumph; the respect for the civil virtues which he carried with him through all the temptations and trials of war; the faith in God and man which sustained him, and was indeed the secret of his power and his success,--what a legacy are these! All that he accomplished is less to us than what he was. To have left an example that will never need defence or substitution to the end of time; an ideal that will warm the heart and point the aspiration of every true American, when hundreds of millions shall be proud of the name; to stand forth, for ever, as what we, happy citizens of the country in which that great soul was cradled, and to which his heart and life were devoted, think a MAN ought to be--what a destiny for him! It is his reward. God has granted his prayers. Nothing earthly would have satisfied him, as we know by what he rejected. He has received that for which he labored.