assuredly shall before the Assembly, I shall add no more than
that, it will always give me pleasure to see you at this place
whenever it is convenient to you, and that with compliments
to your good Mother I remain, D'r Sir, Y'r most Obed't H'ble
Serv't,

"G'o WASHINGTON."

[Illustration: THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON AND CARPENTERS' HALL, WHERE
THE FIRST COLONIAL CONGRESS MET.]

This private note, discussing casually and curtly the great river
of the West, and the minister who endeavored to make it a _flumen
clausum_ to the colonists, nearly equidistant in date between the
Boston Tea-party and the meeting of the Assembly which called the
first Continental Congress, has some public interest. The West
always possessed a peculiar attraction for Washington. He explored
it personally and through others, and lost no occasion of procuring
detailed information in regard to its capabilities. He acquired large
bodies of land along the Ohio at different points, from its affluents
at the foot of the Alleghany to the Great Kanawha and below. Now we
see him gazing farther, over the yet unreddened battle-grounds of
Boone and Lewis, to the magnificent province France and Spain were
carefully holding in joint trusteeship for the infant state he was to
nurse. The representative in the provincial legislature of a frontier
county stretching from the Potomac to the Ohio, we may fancy him
inspired, as he looked around from his post on the vertebral range of
the continent, with "something of prophetic strain." If so, he was
not long to have leisure for indulging it. Within eighteen months his
life's work was to summon him eastward to the sea-shore. The Dark and