Murmurs of another war reached him as he sat at his table planning rural improvements, and from this room he wrote accepting the position no other could fill while he lived. Here death found him, the night before his last illness, when cold and hoarse he came in from his long ride, and warmed himself by his library fire. That night he went up to his room over this favorite study, and said in reply to a member of his family as he passed out, who urged him to do something for it, “No, you know I never take any thing for a cold. Let it go as it came.” The winds and rains of eighty-odd years have beaten upon that sacred home on the high banks of the silvery waters beneath, since the widowed, weary wife was laid to rest beside her noble dead, and the snows of winter and storms of summer have left its weather-worn and stained front looking like some ghost of other days left alone to tell of its former life and beauty. In its lonely grandeur it stands appealing to us for that reverence born of sentiments, stirred by the recollections of the great and good. There was no resisting the feelings of gloomy depression as we passed out the front toward the river, and took the path leading to the tomb. Far down the side of the hill, perched on a knoll surrounded by trees, a summer-house was seen, and the walk leading by many angles down to it. The view of the river is said to be fine from this point, but we did not undertake the difficulties of getting to it. The wooden steps constructed across the ravines are fast sinking to ruin, and the swollen stream from the side of the hill dashing against them, was distinctly audible to us as we stood far above. The swallows and bats seem to have built their nests in its forsaken interior, and we were not inclined to molest them. Many times we looked back at the old homestead endeared to every American, and stamped upon memory each portion of its outlines. High above it, the small cupola sported its little glittering weather-vane as brilliant as though it had been gilded but yesterday. Here again was an object which unconsciously associated Washington with his namesake, Washington Irving. In the pleasant summer-time I had stood in front of the little “Woolfort’s Roost,” and enjoyed to the finest fibre of feeling its lovely simplicity. Above it, too, a little weather-cock coquetted with the wind as it swept down from Tappan Zee, the same said to have been carefully removed from the Vander Hayden palace at Albany, and placed there by tender hands long years ago. Upon the side of the hill I had stopped then as now, and looked back at the house above, embosomed in vines interspersed with delicately tinted fuchsias.