Mary Washington made her will only a year before her death, stating therein that she was "in good health." This was one of the years, during which it has been asserted that she was not only neglected by her son but that they were estranged because of her Tory principles! Besides a few small bequests to her daughter and grandchildren, "desiring their acceptance thereof as all the token I now have to give them," she leaves _all_ her estate "to my Son General George Washington," also--that crowning pride of the early Englishwoman--her best bed, bedstead, curtains, quilt, and other bed furniture. Long after the Englishwoman had lived in Virginia she held her bed in the highest esteem, and always made special mention of it in her will. She came from the land where, from ancient days, the bed was the most important feature in the whole house--made of feathers and adorned with tapestry or with velvets or with "cloth of gold, or miniver." In the "pane" (the forerunner of our "counterpane"--from _contre-pointe_--adorned with "drawn thread lattice work") the ambition of the housewife centred, and was indulged. When Lafayette desired to make a handsome present to Dr. Galt of Williamsburg, who had entertained him, he sent from France a set of velvet bed curtains, dark blue with ornate figuring of gold, quite the handsomest of the textile fabrics exhibited at our Centennial in New York City. Mary Washington bequeathed the articles in which she had most pride to her "Son General George Washington." She was then, May, 1788, "in good health." It appears, from an old letter, she once fell at her door-step and hurt her arm. Perhaps then she also wounded her breast, in which a cancerous growth appeared not long before her death. In those days the medical and surgical sciences were all wrong, if we may believe them to be now all right. A New York writer had said that more lives had been destroyed in that city by physicians than by all other causes whatever.