Increasing infirmity and too frequent aches and ailments remind me that I am nearing the awful moment when I must bid adieu to sublunary things, and appear before that Divine Being to whom alone my country owes the success with which we have been blessed. But the great Disposer of events is also the Being who has formed the instruments of his will and left them responsible to the arbitration of conscience. Therefore I have of late spent much time in considering my past life, and how it might have been better or more successful, and in thankfulness that it has escaped many pitfalls. My reflections have brought back to mind a remark which seems to me just, made by my aide, Colonel Tilghman, a man more given to philosophic reflection than I have been. He asked me if I did not think there was something providential in the way each period of my life had been an education for that which followed it. I said that this idea had at times presented itself to my mind, and when I betrayed curiosity, he went on to say that my very early education in self-reliance and my training as a surveyor of wild lands had fitted me for frontier warfare, that this in turn had prepared me for action on a larger stage, and that all through the greater war my necessities called for constant dealing with political questions, and with men who were not soldiers. He thought that this had in turn educated me for the position to which my countrymen summoned me at a later time. As I was silent for a little, this gentleman, who became my aide-de-camp in June, 1780, and for whom I conceived a warm and lasting affection, thinking his remark might have been considered a liberty, said as much, excusing himself. I replied that, so far from annoying me, I found what he had to say interesting. When, recently, these remarks of Colonel Tilghman recurred to me, I felt that they were correct, and dwelling upon them at this remote time, my interest in the sequence of the events of my youthful life assumed an importance which has led me of late to endeavour, with the aid of my diaries, to refresh my memories of a past which had long ceased to engage my attention.