When the boy was not yet ten years of age he closes a playful letter, adapted to such tender years, with these earnest words: Be true, kind, and generous, and pray earnestly to God to enable you to keep His commandments and to walk in the same all the days of your life. A year later, writing from the ship _Massachusetts_, off Lobos, to his two sons, a letter full of interest to boys, he urges them to diligence in study: I shall not feel my long separation from you if I find that my absence has been of no injury to you, and that you have both grown in goodness and knowledge as well as in stature; but how I shall suffer on my return if the reverse has occurred. You enter into all my thoughts, into all my prayers, and on you in part will depend whether I shall be happy or miserable, as you know how much I love you. Ten years later, when the son had become a lieutenant in the Army, he admonishes him: I hope you will always be distinguished for your avoidance of the universal bane whisky and every immorality. Nor need you fear to be ruled out of the society that indulges in it, for you will acquire their esteem and respect, as all venerate, if they do not practice, virtue. I hope you will make many friends, as you will be thrown with those who deserve this feeling. But indiscriminate intimacies you will find annoying and entangling, and they can be avoided by politeness and civility. When I think of your youth, impulsiveness, and many temptations, your distance from me, and the ease (and even innocence) with which you might commence an erroneous course, my heart quails within me and my whole frame and being tremble at the possible results. May Almighty God have you in His holy keeping. To His merciful providence I commit you, and I will rely upon Him and the efficacy of the prayers that will be daily and hourly offered up by those who love you. A year or two later, on New Year's Day, 1859, he writes: I always thought there was stuff in you for a good soldier and I trust you will prove it. I can not express the gratification I felt, in meeting Col. May in New York, at the encomium he passed upon your soldiership, your zeal, and your devotion to your duty. But I was more pleased at the report of your conduct; that went more to my heart and was of infinite comfort to me. Hold on to your purity and virtue; they will proudly sustain you in all trials and difficulties and cheer you in every calamity. So, too, when the young lieutenant had married and settled down a typical Virginian farmer upon the estate left him by his grandfather Custis, the well-known "White House" on the Pamunkey, the home of Martha Washington: