The next night comes, and with it the same causes of postponement, and so on....

I have not looked into a book since I came home; nor shall I be able to do it until I have discharged my workmen, probably not before the nights grow longer, when possibly I may be looking in Doomsday Book." He had his usual troubles with servants and crops, with delinquent tenants and other debtors; he tried Booker's threshing machine, experimented with white Indian peas and several varieties of wheat, including a yellow bearded kind that was supposed to resist the fly, and built two houses, or rather a double house, on property owned in the Federal City--he avoided calling the place "Washington." A picture of the Farmer out upon his rounds in these last days has been left us by his adopted son, George Washington Parke Custis.

Custis relates that one day when out with a gun he met on the forest road an elderly gentleman on horseback who inquired where he could find the General.

The boy told the stranger, who proved to be Colonel Meade, once of Washington's staff, that the General was abroad on the estate and pointed out what direction to take to come upon him.

"You will meet, sir, with an old gentleman riding alone in plain drab clothes, a broad-brimmed white hat, a hickory switch in his hand, and carrying an umbrella with a long staff, which is attached to his saddle-bow--that person, sir, is General Washington." Those were pleasant rides the old Farmer took in the early morning sunshine, with the birds singing about him, the dirt lanes soft under his horse's feet, and in his nostrils the pure air fragrant with the scent of pines, locust blossoms or wild honeysuckle.