to our Lodgings where we had a good Dinner prepared for us.  Wine and Rum Punch in plenty, and a good Feather Bed with clean sheets, which was a very agreeable regale.

The longest of Washington’s early expeditions was the “Journey over the Mountains, began Fryday the 11th of March 1747/8.”  The mountains were the Alleghanies, and the trip gave him a closer acquaintance than he had had with Indians in the wilds.  On his return, he stayed with his half-brother, Lawrence, at Mount Vernon, or with Lord Fairfax, and enjoyed the country life common to the richer Virginians of the time.  Towns which could provide an inn being few and far between, travellers sought hospitality in the homes of the well-to-do residents, and every one was in a way a neighbor of the other dwellers in his county.  So both at Belvoir and at Mount Vernon, guests were frequent and broke the monotony and loneliness of their inmates.  I think the reputation of gravity, which was fixed upon Washington in his mature years, has been projected back over his youth.  The actual records are lacking, but such hints and surmises as we have do not warrant our thinking of him as a self-centred, unsociable youth.  On the contrary, he was rather, what would be called now, a sport, ready for hunting or riding, of splendid physical build, agile and strong.  He liked dancing, and was not too shy to enjoy the society of young women; indeed, he wrote poems to some of them, and seems to have been popular with them.  And still, the legend remains that he was bashful.

From our earliest glimpses of him, Washington appears as a youth very particular as to his dress.  He knew how to rough it as the extracts of his personal journals which I have quoted show, and this passage confirms: 

I seem to be in a place where no real satisfaction is to be had.  Since you received my letter in October last, I have not sleep’d above three or four nights in a bed, but, after walking a good deal all the day, I lay down before the fire upon a little hay, straw, fodder, or bearskin, which ever is to be had, with man, wife, and children, like a parcel of dogs and cats, and happy is he who gets the berth nearest the fire.  There’s nothing would make it pass off tolerably but a good reward.  A doubloon is my constant gain every day that the weather will permit my going out, and sometimes six pistoles.  The coldness of the weather will not allow of my making a long stay, as the lodging is rather too cold for this time of year.  I have never had my clothes off but lay and sleep in them, except the few nights I have lay’n in Frederic Town.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Hapgood, p, 11.]

Later, when Washington became master of Mount Vernon, his servants were properly liveried.  He himself rode to hounds in the approved apparel of a fox-hunting British gentleman, and we find in the lists of articles for which he sends to London the names of clothes and other articles for Mrs. Washington and the children carefully specified with the word “fashionable” or “very best quality” added.  Still later, when he was President he attended to this matter of dress with even greater punctilio.