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 mix no more in political or public worries; but he soon found that he had deceived himself.  The army, until it officially disbanded at the end of 1783, caused him constant anxiety interspersed with fits of indignation over the indifference and inertia of the Congress, which showed no intention of being just to the soldiers.  The reason for its attitude seems hard to state positively.  May it be that the Congress, jealous since the war began of being ruled by the man on horseback, feared at its close to grant Washington’s demands for it lest they should bring about the very thing they had feared and avoided—­the creation of a military dictatorship under Washington?  When Vergennes proposed to entrust to Washington a new subsidy from France, the Congress had taken umbrage and regarded such a proposal as an insult to the American Government.  Should they admit that the Government itself was not sufficiently sound and trustworthy, and that, therefore, a private individual, even though he had been a leader of the Revolution, must be called into service?

From among persons pestered by this obsession, it was not surprising that the idea should spring up that Washington was at heart a believer in monarchy and that he might, when the opportunity favored, allow himself to be proclaimed king.  Several years later he wrote to his trusted friend, John Jay: