appointed a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer.  The first result was prompt dissolution of the assembly.  The next was another meeting in the long room of the Raleigh tavern, where the Boston bill was denounced, non-importation renewed, and the committee of correspondence instructed to take steps for calling a general congress.  Events were beginning to move at last with perilous rapidity.  Washington dined with Lord Dunmore on the evening of that day, rode with him, and appeared at her ladyship’s ball the next night, for it was not his way to bite his thumb at men from whom he differed politically, nor to call the motives of his opponents in question.  But when the 1st of June arrived, he noted in his diary that he fasted all day and attended the appointed services.  He always meant what he said, being of a simple nature, and when he fasted and prayed there was something ominously earnest about it, something that his excellency the governor, who liked the society of this agreeable man and wise counselor, would have done well to consider and draw conclusions from, and which he probably did not heed at all.  He might well have reflected, as he undoubtedly failed to do, that when men of the George Washington type fast and pray on account of political misdoings, it is well for their opponents to look to it carefully.

Meantime Boston had sent forth appeals to form a league among the colonies, and thereupon another meeting was held in the Raleigh tavern, and a letter was dispatched advising the burgesses to consider this matter of a general league and take the sense of their respective counties.  Virginia and Massachusetts had joined hands now, and they were sweeping the rest of the continent irresistibly forward with them.  As for Washington, he returned to Mount Vernon and at once set about taking the sense of his county, as he had agreed.  Before doing so he had some correspondence with his old friend Bryan Fairfax.  The Fairfaxes naturally sided with the mother-country, and Bryan was much distressed by the course of Virginia, and remonstrated strongly, and at length by letter, against violent measures.  Washington replied to him:  “Does it not appear as clear as the sun in its meridian brightness that there is a regular, systematic plan formed to fix the right and practice of taxation on us?  Does not the uniform conduct of Parliament for some years past confirm this?  Do not all the debates, especially those just brought to us in the House of Commons, on the side of government expressly declare that America must be taxed in aid of the British funds, and that she has no longer resources within herself?  Is there anything to be expected from petitioning after this?  Is not the attack upon the liberty and property of the people of Boston, before restitution of the loss to the India Company was demanded, a plain and self-evident proof of what they are aiming at?  Do not the subsequent bills (now I dare say acts) for depriving the Massachusetts