and the grandmother of Robert E. Lee, the great soldier of the Southern Confederacy.  The affair with Miss Cary went on apparently for some years, fitfully pursued in the intervals of war and Indian fighting, and interrupted also by matters of a more tender nature.  The first diversion occurred about 1752, when we find Washington writing to William Fauntleroy, at Richmond, that he proposed to come to his house to see his sister, Miss Betsy, and that he hoped for a revocation of her former cruel sentence.[3] Miss Betsy, however, seems to have been obdurate, and we hear no more of love affairs until much later, and then in connection with matters of a graver sort.

[Footnote 1:  Quoted from the Willis Ms. by Mr. Conway, in Magazine of American History, March, 1887, p. 196.]

[Footnote 2:  Magazine of American History, i. 324.]

[Footnote 3:  Historical Magazine, 3d series, 1873.  Letter communicated by Fitzhugh Lee.]

[Illustration:  Mary Cary]

When Captain Dagworthy, commanding thirty men in the Maryland service, undertook in virtue of a king’s commission to outrank the commander-in-chief of the Virginian forces, Washington made up his mind that he would have this question at least finally and properly settled.  So, as has been said, he went to Boston, saw Governor Shirley, and had the dispute determined in his own favor.  He made the journey on horseback, and had with him two of his aides and two servants.  An old letter, luckily preserved, tells us how he looked, for it contains orders to his London agents for various articles, sent for perhaps in anticipation of this very expedition.  In Braddock’s campaign the young surveyor and frontier soldier had been thrown among a party of dashing, handsomely equipped officers fresh from London, and their appearance had engaged his careful attention.  Washington was a thoroughly simple man in all ways, but he was also a man of taste and a lover of military discipline.  He had a keen sense of appropriateness, a valuable faculty which stood him in good stead in grave as well as trivial matters all through his career, and which in his youth came out most strongly in the matter of manners and personal appearance.  He was a handsome man, and liked to be well dressed and to have everything about himself or his servants of the best.  Yet he was not a mere imitator of fashions or devoted to fine clothes.  The American leggins and fringed hunting-shirt had a strong hold on his affections, and he introduced them into Forbes’s army, and again into the army of the Revolution, as the best uniform for the backwoods fighters.  But he learned with Braddock that the dress of parade has as real military value as that of service, and when he traveled northward to settle about Captain Dagworthy, he felt justly that he now was going on parade for the first time as the representative of his troops and his colony.  Therefore with excellent sense he dressed as befitted the occasion, and at the same time gratified his own taste.