soldiers, of leading forlorn hopes against the truculent enemy, must
have seemed to the weary and war-worn General like a call from the
Hesperides. Men of his iron nature, and of his capacity for work and
joy in it, do not, of course, really delight in idleness. They may
think that they crave idleness, but in reality they crave the power of
going on.

It took comparatively little effort for Washington to fall into
his old way of life at Mount Vernon, although there, too, much was
changed. Old buildings had fallen out of repair. There were new
experiments to be tried, and the general purpose to be carried out of
making Mount Vernon a model place in that part of the country. Whether
he would or not, he was sought for almost daily by persons who came
from all parts of the United States, and from overseas. Hospitality
being not merely a duty, but a passion with him, he gladly received
the strangers and learned much from them. From their accounts of their
interviews we see that, although he was really the most natural of
men, some of them treated him as if he were some strange creature--a
holy white elephant of Siam, or the Grand Lama of Tibet. Age had
brought its own deductions and reservations. 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