he adds, “and with it the same causes for postponement, and so on.”  He has not had time to look into a book.  He is dazed by the incessant number of new faces which appear at Mount Vernon.  They come, he says, out of “respect” for him, but their real reason is curiosity.  He practises Virginian hospitality very lavishly, but he cannot endure the late hours.  So he invites his nephew, Lawrence Lewis, to spend as much time as he can at Mount Vernon while he himself and Mrs. Washington go to bed early, “soon after candle light.”  Lewis accepted the invitation all the more willingly because he found at the mansion Nelly Custis, a pretty and sprightly young lady with whom he promptly fell in love and married later.  Nelly and her brother George had been adopted by Washington and brought up in the family.  She was his particular pet.  Like other mature men he found the boys of the younger generation somewhat embarrassing.  I suppose they felt, as well they might, a great and awful gulf yawning between them.  “I can govern men,” he would say, “but I cannot govern boys."[1] With Nelly Custis, however, he found it easy to be chums.  No one can forget the mock-serious letter in which he wrote to her in regard to becoming engaged and gave her advice about falling in love.  The letter is unexpected and yet it bears every mark of sincerity and reveals a genuine vein in his nature.  We must always think of Nelly as one of the refreshments of his older life and as one of its great delights.  He considered himself an old man now.  His hair no longer needed powder; years and cares had made it white.  He spoke of himself without affectation as a very old man, and apparently he often thought, as he was engaged in some work, “this is the last time I shall do this.”  He seems to have taken it for granted that he was not to live long; but this neither slackened his industry nor made him gloomy.  And he had in truth spent a life of almost unremitting laboriousness.  Those early years as surveyor and Indian fighter and pathfinder were years of great hardships.  The eight years of the Revolution were a continuous physical strain, an unending responsibility, and sometimes a bodily deprivation.  And finally his last service as President had brought him disgusts, pinpricks which probably wore more on his spirits than did the direct blows of his opponents.  Very likely he felt old in his heart of hearts, much older than his superb physical form betokened.  We cannot but rejoice that Nelly Custis flashed some of the joyfulness and divine insouciance of youth into the tired heart of the tired great man.

[Footnote 1:  Irving, V, 277.]