a pensioner, while we had the means of supporting her; but in fact she has an ample income of her own.  I lament accordingly that your letter, which conveyed the first hint of this matter, did not come to my hands sooner; but I request, in pointed terms, if the matter is now in agitation in your Assembly, that all proceedings on it may be stopped, or in case of a decision in her favor, that it may be done away and repealed at my request.”

Still greater mortification was in store for him, when he was told that she was borrowing and accepting gifts from her neighbors, and learned “on good authority that she is, upon all occasions and in all companies, complaining ... of her wants and difficulties; and if not in direct terms, at least by strong innuendoes, endeavors to excite a belief that times are much altered, &c., &c., which not only makes her appear in an unfavorable point of view, but those also who are connected with her.”  To save her feelings he did not express the “pain” he felt to her, but he wrote a brother asking him to ascertain if there was the slightest basis in her complaints, and “see what is necessary to make her comfortable,” for “while I have anything I will part with it to make her so;” but begging him “at the same time ... to represent to her in delicate terms, the impropriety of her complaints, and acceptance of favors, even when they are voluntarily offered, from any but relations.”  Though he did not “touch upon this subject in a letter to her,” he was enough fretted to end the renting of her plantation, not because “I mean ... to withhold any aid or support I can give from you; for whilst I have a shilling left, you shall have part,” but because “what I shall then give, I shall have credit for,” and not be “viewed as a delinquent, and considered perhaps by the world as [an] unjust and undutiful son.”

In the last years of her life a cancer developed, which she refused to have “dressed,” and over which, as her doctor wrote Washington, the “Old Lady” and he had “a small battle every day.”  Once Washington was summoned by an express to her bedside “to bid, as I was prepared to expect, the last adieu to an honored parent,” but it was a false alarm.  Her health was so bad, however, that just before he started to New York to be inaugurated he rode to Fredericksburg, “and took a final leave of my mother, never expecting to see her more,” a surmise that proved correct.

Only Elizabeth—­or “Betty”—­of Washington’s sisters grew to womanhood, and it is said that she was so strikingly like her brother that, disguised with a long cloak and a military hat, the difference between them was scarcely detectable.  She married Fielding Lewis, and lived at “Kenmore House” on the Rappahannock, where Washington spent many a night, as did the Lewises at Mount Vernon.  During the Revolution, while visiting there, she wrote her brother, “Oh, when will that day arrive when we shall meet again.  Trust in the lord it will be soon,—­till when, you have the prayers and kind wishes for your health and happiness of your loving and sincerely affectionate sister.”  Her husband died “much indebted,” and from that time her brother gave her occasional sums of money, and helped her in other ways.