The great man lived well, his principal meal being a three o’clock dinner, which he washed down with five glasses of Madeira, taken with dessert. This allowance he gradually increased toward the close of his life till it reached two bottles. In sending away for sale a slave whom, though troublesome, he guaranteed as “exceedingly healthy, strong and good at the hoe,” he expressed his willingness to take in part payment “a hogshead of the best rum” and an indefinite quantity of “good old spirits.” In our gout-fearing era, these data have the ring of immoderate indulgence, but measured by the standards of the eighteenth century they were temperate enough. It must be said for the General, also, that he was charitable in his judgment of the weaknesses of others, as shown by his contract with an overseer, to whom he conceded the privilege of getting drunk for a week once a year; and his campaign expenses for election to the Virginia legislature embraced a hogshead and a barrel of punch, thirty-five gallons of wine, and forty-three gallons of strong cider. It makes us feel a little nearer to the Father of our Country to learn that he was not immune to the influence of bright eyes and dainty toilets; that he was in love, or fancied he was, with several different damsels at as many different times; and that his self-surrender occasionally declared itself in amatory verse too dreadful for belief. His most serious infatuation seems to have been with a Miss Gary, whom he courted fervently, only to be dismissed by her father with the sordid reminder: “My daughter, sir, has been accustomed to ride in her own coach!” As this was a knock-down argument for a stripling surveyor who [Illustration: _Ford’s Theatre, the Old Front_] was just struggling to raise his professional terms to twenty-five dollars a day when employed, he went his way, but sought consolation in winning Martha Custis, who resembled Miss Cary almost as a twin sister. Of Mary Washington, mother of George, we get glimpses in the familiar chat of the vicinage. She appears as a rather difficult person, who tried the methodical soul of her son by her thriftless habits and her incessant complaints of being out of money. For years he did his utmost to induce her to rent her plantation further down the State, hire out her slaves, and live on her fixed income thus obtained, but to no purpose. Yet after he had become so famous that he was obliged to entertain at Mount Vernon all the traveling celebrities of two hemispheres, she suddenly took it into her head that she would like to come and live with him. In spite of his filial piety, candor compelled him to show her the impracticability of her proposal; and, though he tried to soften her disappointment by sending her the last seventy-five dollars in his purse, she seems to have continued dissatisfied.