Of his wife’s kith and kin Washington was equally fond. Both alone and with Mrs. Washington he often visited her mother, Mrs. Dandridge, and in 1773 he wrote to a brother-in-law that he wished “I was master of Arguments powerful enough to prevail upon Mrs. Dandridge to make this place her entire and absolute home. I should think as she lives a lonesome life (Betsey being married) it might suit her well, & be agreeable, both to herself & my Wife, to me most assuredly it would.” Washington was also a frequent visitor at “Eltham,” the home of Colonel Bassett, who had married his wife’s sister, and constantly corresponded with these relatives. He asked this whole family to be his guests at the Warm Springs, and, as this meant camping out in tents, he wrote, “You will have occasion to provide nothing, if I can be advised of your intentions, so that I may provide accordingly.” To another brother-in-law, Bartholomew Dandridge, he lent money, and forgave the debt to the widow in his will, also giving her the use during her life of the thirty-three negroes he had bid in at the bankruptcy sale of her husband’s property. The pleasantest glimpses of family feeling are gained, however, in his relations with his wife’s children and grandchildren. John Parke and Martha Parke Custis—or “Jack” and “Patsey,” as he called them—were at the date of his marriage respectively six and four years of age, and in the first invoice of goods to be shipped to him from London after he had become their step-father, Washington ordered “10 shillings worth of Toys,” “6 little books for children beginning to read,” and “1 fashionable-dressed baby to cost 10 shillings.” When this latter shared the usual fate, he further wrote for “1 fashionable dress Doll to cost a guinea,” and for “A box of Gingerbread Toys & Sugar Images or Comfits.” A little later he ordered a Bible and Prayer-Book for each, “neatly bound in Turkey,” with names “in gilt letters on the inside of the cover,” followed ere long by an order for “1 very good Spinet” As Patsy grew to girlhood she developed fits, and “solely on her account to try (by the advice of her Physician) the effect of the waters on her Complaint,” Washington took the family over the mountains and camped at the “Warm Springs” in 1769, with “little benefit,” for, after ailing four years longer, “she was seized with one of her usual Fits & expired in it, in less than two minutes, without uttering a word, or groan, or scarce a sigh.” “The Sweet Innocent Girl,” Washington wrote, “entered into a more happy & peaceful abode than she has met with in the afflicted Path she has hitherto trod,” but none the less “it is an easier matter to conceive than to describe the distress of this family” at the loss of “dear Patsy Custis.” [Illustration: JOHN AND MARTHA PARKE CUSTIS]