Not a word of the emotions which that visit must have roused!

For almost six years after 1775 there is a gap in the diary, though for some months of 1780 he sets down the weather.  On May I, 1781, he begins a new record, which he calls a Journal, and he expresses regret that he has not had time to keep one all the time.  The subjects now considered are almost wholly military and the entries reveal a different man from that of 1775.  The grammar is better, the vocabulary larger, the tone more elevated, the man himself is bigger and broader with an infinitely wider viewpoint.

From November 5, 1781, for more than three years there is another blank, except for the journal of his trip to his western lands already referred to.  But on January 1, 1785, he begins a new Diary and thenceforward continues it, with short intermissions, until the day of his last ride over his estate.

A few of the diaries and journals have been lost, but most are still in existence.  Some are in the Congressional Library and there also is the Toner transcript of these records.  The transcript makes thirty-seven large volumes.  The diary is one of the main sources from which the material for this book is drawn.

The original of the record of events for 1760 is a small book, perhaps eight or ten inches long by four inches wide and much yellowed by age.  Part of the first entry stands thus: 

“January 1, Tuesday

“Visited my Plantations and received an Instance of Mr. French’s great Love of Money in disappointing me of some Pork because the price had risen to 22.6 after he had engaged to let me have it at 20 s.”

On his return from his winter ride he found Mrs. Washington “broke out with the Meazles.”  Next day he states with evident disgust that he has taken the pork on French’s own terms.

The weather record for 1760 was kept on blank pages of The Virginia Almanac, a compendium that contains directions for making “Indico,” for curing bloody flux, for making “Physick as pleasant as a Dish of Chocolate,” for making a striking sun-dial, also “A Receipt to keep one’s self warm a whole Winter with a single Billet of Wood.”  To do this last “Take a Billet of Wood of a competent Size, fling it out of the Garret-Window into the Yard, run down Stairs as hard as ever you can drive; and when you have got it, run up again with it at the same Measure of Speed; and thus keep throwing down, and fetching up, till the Exercise shall have sufficiently heated you.  This renew as often as Occasion shall require. Probatum est.”

This receipt would seem worth preserving in this day of dear fuel.  As Washington had great abundance of wood and plenty of negroes to cut it, he probably did not try the experiment—­at least such a conclusion is what writers on historical method would call “a safe inference.”

[Illustration:  First Page of Washington’s Digest of Duhamel’s Husbandry]