In her new home, as in the White House, she superintended the affairs of the household, exercising continual control over all culinary matters; carefully educating her offspring, and aiming to rear them up for usefulness. These duties she discharged with the utmost assiduity and faithfulness, in spite of the many social obligations which a woman in her position must necessarily encounter.[1] Nor did the demands of courtesy and of her family debar her from habitual and systematic charities, dispensed in her neighborhood, or from those most important of all daily duties, the calls of the "closet." In the language of Miss Conkling, in her Memoir: "It is recorded of this devout Christian, that never during her life, whether in prosperity or in adversity, did she omit that daily self-communion and self-examination, and those private devotional exercises, which would best prepare her for the self-control and self-denial by which she was, for more than half a century, so eminently distinguished. It was her habit to retire to her own apartment every morning after breakfast, there to devote an hour to solitary prayer and meditation." [1] We have the authority of Mr. Sparks for asserting that while Washington's pursuits were those of a retired planter, he seldom passed a day when at home without the company of friends or strangers, frequently persons of great celebrity, and demanding much attention from the lady of the house. In 1770, she lost a child of many prayers, of bright hopes, and of much promise, her blooming daughter. She looked upon this affliction as a visitation from Him who doeth all things well, and bore it with becoming resignation, which the Christian only is prepared to do. During the Revolution, Mrs. Washington was accustomed to pass the winters with her husband at the head quarters of the army and the summers at Mount Vernon; and it was in the camp that she shone with the lustre of the true woman. "She was at Valley Forge in that dreadful winter of 1777-8, her presence and submission to privation strengthening the fortitude of those who might have complained, and giving hope and confidence to the desponding. She soothed the distresses of many sufferers, seeking out the poor and afflicted with benevolent kindness, extending relief wherever it was in her power, and with graceful deportment presiding in the Chief's humble dwelling."[2] [2] Mrs. Washington, in writing to Mrs. Warren, says, "The General's apartment is very small; he has had a log cabin built to dine in, which has made our quarters more tolerable than at first." In 1781, she lost her last surviving child, John Custis, aged twenty seven. Her widowed daughter-in-law and the four children, she took to her own home, and thenceforward they were the objects of her untiring solicitude.