It does not appear that parties rode to hounds after the fox any more at Mount Vernon.

And then there were the irreparable gaps that could not be filled.

At Belvoir, where his neighbors the Fairfaxes, friends of a lifetime, used to live, they lived no more.

One of them, more than ninety years old, had turned his face to the wall on hearing of the surrender at Yorktown.

Another had gone back to England to live out his life there, true to his Tory convictions.
Washington had sincerely believed, no doubt, that he was to spend the rest of his life in dignified leisure, and especially that he would mix no more in political or public worries; but he soon found that he had deceived himself.