A little touch of his manner to his wife is seen in a letter, which is in print, written to her from the city of Washington, on February 23, 1825, in his seventieth year. He had received an injury to his knee, about which Mrs. Marshall was anxious. “I shall be out,” he writes, “in a few days. All the ladies of the secretaries have been to see me, some more than once, and have brought me more jelly than I could eat, and many other things. I thank them, and stick to my barley broth. Still I have lots of time on my hands. How do you think I beguile it? I am almost tempted to leave you to guess, until I write again. You must know that I begin with the ball at York, our splendid assembly at the Palace in Williamsburg, my visit to Richmond for a fortnight, my return to the field, and the very welcome reception you gave me on my arrival at Dover, our little tiffs and makings-up, my feelings when Major Dick[8] was courting you, my trip to the Cottage [the Ambler home in Hanover County, where the marriage took place],[9]--the thousand little incidents, deeply affecting, in turn.” This “ball at York” was the one of which Mrs. Carrington wrote; and of the “assembly at the Palace” she also gave an account, remarking that “Marshall was devoted to my sister.” Miss Martineau, who saw him the year before he died, speaks with great emphasis of what she calls his “reverence” and his affectionate respect for women. There were many signs of this all through his life. Even in the grave and too monotonous course of his “Life of Washington,” one comes now and then upon a little gleam of this sort, that lights up the page; as when he speaks of Washington’s engagement to Mrs. Custis, a lady “who to a large fortune and a fine person added those amiable accomplishments which ... fill with silent but unceasing felicity the quiet scenes of private life.” When he is returning from France, in 1798, he writes gayly back from Bordeaux to the Secretary of Legation at Paris: “Present me to my friends in Paris; and have the goodness to say to Madame Vilette, in my name and in the handsomest manner, everything which respectful friendship can dictate. When you have done that, you will have rendered not quite half justice to my sentiments.” “He was a man,” said Judge Story, “of deep sensibility and tenderness; ... whatever may be his fame in the eyes of the world, that which, in a just sense, was his brightest glory was the purity, affectionateness, liberality, and devotedness of his domestic life.” Marshall left the army in 1781, when most of the fighting in Virginia was over; and began practice in Fauquier County when the courts were opened, after Cornwallis’s surrender, in October of that year.