He was very fond of Fredericksburg, and well he might be, for it is still a strangely lovable town, demurely peaceful in spite of the great people who have dwelt there and the tremendous battles that have drenched its gentle slopes with blood. It was there and then that John Paul lived when he added Jones to his name.

The Rappahannock saunters through the realm that Washington called "the place of my growing infancy," and one can see where he threw the Spanish dollar across its banks, the Cherry Tree Farm, where he confessed his inability to tell a lie, the little home his mother occupied from 1775 to her dying day, the stately mansion where his sister, Betty Lewis, lived, and the tavern where he spent so many hours of moderate gambling.

His mother's little story-and-a-half house, though now cut off by modern buildings, was at first connected by a long box-bordered walk with Kenmore, the home of Fielding Lewis. Washington was doubly bound to Fielding Lewis, whose first wife was Washington's aunt, and whose second wife was his sister. Betty Lewis kept in close touch with her mother, with whom she seems to have been on far tenderer relations than George ever was.

"Sister Lewis," as Washington usually calls her, bore her husband six children, some of whom later stood close to Washington in battle. Like so many others in the colonies, they also borrowed money from him.

With Fielding Lewis, a prosperous merchant and a burgess (therefore a vestryman), Washington had much in common. They went in together on various businesses, and in 1760 Washington paid Lewis £5, "on account of Iron Work Scheme," which was a plan to erect a foundry at "The Bloomery" where, as he wrote in his Diary, "The Convenience of Water is great . . . I saw none of the Ore, but all People agree that there is an inexhaustable fund of that that

is rich. But wood seems an obstacle." 10 The scheme came

to naught.

But iron foundries never succeeded well in Virginia. The mother country kept passing laws to make all forms of manufacture impossible to the colonists. They could not even make beaver hats in a world of beavers.

Still, Fielding Lewis came to be a great gun-maker for the Revolution, and succeeded in shattering his health and his fortune for his ungrateful country. After borrowing thousands of pounds to lend to Virginia, he was unable to pay his taxes and was sold out." At this time, however, he was rich and happy. His home was, and is, a paragon of grace. Washington loved it, designed a very ingenious ornament for its mantelpiece, and later set Hessian prisoners to work upon its exceedingly graceful ornate white ceilings.

12

Perhaps Washington and Fielding Lewis were in sympathy concerning Mary Washington, whom George found a difficult mother, though he was a devoted son. In an address to "the Worshipful the Mayor and Commonalty of the Corporation of Fredericksburg" he thanked them for the "honorable mention which is made of my revered mother, by whose maternal hand (early deprived of a Father) I was led to manhood."

In Fredericksburg one hears the most exciting things about Mary Washington. They are handed down by oral tradition alone and are impossible to confirm-or disprove.

While Mrs. Pryor 13 and others defend her, as her son is defended, from the imputation of any human frailties whatever, the legend of her fierce temper is still vivid in Fredericksburg, and the story is told that she was so angered once by the disobedience of a slave lad who drove her carriage that she seized the whip from his hands and gave him

a furious lashing with it before all the bystanders, cursing him richly the while.

This demonstration took place, if at all, in front of an apothecary shop, the oldest in America, kept by Dr. Hugh Mercer, a Scot by birth, who turned out to be a brilliant general, and as valiant a soldier as ever apothecary was. His statue with drawn sword now decorates one of the city squares. In his earlier years he kept a singularly graceful drug store, which still stands in Fredericksburg.

Mary Washington is said to have been an earnest pipesmoker, in which she would have differed radically from her son, George, as she did on so many points. George grew sick at the least puff of tobacco, though he had many snuffboxes. And he grew to hate the plant as a crop since it exhausted the none too rich soil of Virginia, and failed to bring him the profits he hoped for in spite of all his devotion to it.

Whether his mother smoked or not, or drank or not, is no great matter except that she was the mother of George. The wife of the Puritan Governor Winthrop wrote to her husband in 1627: "My good mother commends hir love to you all and thankes you for hir tobacko."

14

Countless other women in that tobacco-worshipping land smoked in those days, as now; and the anecdotes of Mary's flares of temper are no more cruel to her than some of the grandiloquent icy speeches put into her mouth by equally uncertain legend.

A pathetic, but typically querulous letter of hers was probably the cause of Betty's moving her off her farm to the town house. It was written to her son, John Augustine:

"Dear Johnne,-I am glad to hear you and all the family is well, and should be glad if I could write you the same. I am a going fast, and it, the time, is hard. I am borrowing a little

Cornn-no Cornn in the Cornn house. I never lived soe poore in my life. Was it not for Mr. French and your sister Lewis I should be almost starved, but I am like an old almanack quite out of date. Give my love to Mrs. Washington-all the family. I am dear Johnne your loving and affectionate Mother.

"P.S. I should be glad to see you as I dont expect to hold out long."

>> 15

Mary's name appears incessantly in Washington's account books and diaries. He took good care of her business for her, visited her with filial regularity, and paid her profound respect, saying at the last: "I attribute all of my success in life to the moral, intellectual, and physical education which I received from my mother." 16

But if she was as terrifying as all the traditions indicate, it is not to be wondered at that her son spent so much of his time at the Rising Sun Tavern kept by George Weedon, who also became a general in the Revolution, and whose inn still stands in the all-preserving amber of Fredericksburg.

The legends abide that Washington fought many a long night-battle with the local card-sharks at Weedon's, and admitted that they were "too smart for him." But he never gave up trying to bring his winnings up to his losses, and never succeeded.

The ledgers he kept show, in his own handwriting, how constantly he played and just how he stood when they blew out the candles and went home.

After he had tasted the idolatry that came to him in his later years, he withdrew himself from the mob, rather in self-defence than in self-worship, but at Fredericksburg he was always among old friends, and remained the boy and the young man.

General Maury," a distinguished Fredericksburg soldier, perpetuates one of the more genial traditions that came to him direct from a friend of Washington's:

"His arrival was the occasion of great conviviality and