This is a pleasing picture of the mother of our adored Washington, and it is as true a picture as we have authority for drawing. It would have helped much if we could have accepted any one of the portraits claiming to be genuine, although no one of them expresses the type which we may reasonably suppose to have been hers. Her own descendants and the wisest historians declare she left no portrait. A picture, claiming to be such, hangs to-day in Lancaster court-house--one that was genuine was burned in the home of her early married life. Handsome and stately she certainly was. Nor can we suppose from the character developed in her early maternal life, that she mingled to any extent in the gayeties of her time. In no letter, no record of any kind, is her name mentioned until her marriage. She was doubtless always grave, always thoughtful, concerning herself much with her religious duties, industrious in womanly occupations, reverently attentive to the services at Yeocomico church, of which the Eskridge family were members. We may be sure she was instructed in dancing--the universal accomplishment of the time. The saintly blind preacher, James Waddell, had his daughters, to the great scandal of his Presbyterian followers, taught to dance; his defence being that "no parent has a right to make his children unfit for polite society." Members of the Lee, Corbyn, and other influential families of her neighborhood urged the building of a "Banquetting House"--a rustic casino--in Pickatown's Field in Westmoreland, according to contracts made years before, "to make an Honourable treatment fit to entertain the undertakers thereof, their wives, mistresses (sweethearts) and friends, yearly and every year;" and the "yearly and every year" was likely to be construed, as the merry colonists knew well how to construe all opportunities for pleasure. For despite Francis Makemie, James Waddell, and the truly evangelical priests of the Established Church--of whom there were still some--the times went merrily in old Virginia; and the waters of the York had cooled long ago the fevered blood of the first martyr to freedom; and Benjamin Franklin was composing ballads upon "Blackbeard, the pyrate," to say nothing of rollicking rhymes fit no longer for ears polite; and Patrick Henry, and Richard Henry Lee, and George Washington were yet unborn.