the owner admires, and indicate the tastes he best loves to gratify.  When Washington first settled with his wife at Mount Vernon, he ordered from Europe the busts of Alexander the Great, Charles XII. of Sweden, Julius Caesar, Frederick of Prussia, Marlborough, and Prince Eugene, and in addition he asked for statuettes of “two wild beasts.”  The combination of soldier and statesman is the predominant admiration, then comes the reckless and splendid military adventurer, and lastly wild life and the chase.  There is no mistaking the ideas and fancies of the man who penned this order which has drifted down to us from the past.

But as Washington’s active life was largely out of doors, so too were his pleasures.  He loved the fresh open-air existence of the woods and fields, and there he found his one great amusement.  He shot and fished, but did not care much for these pursuits, for his hobby was hunting, which gratified at once his passion for horses and dogs and his love for the strong excitement of the chase, when dashed with just enough danger to make it really fascinating.  He showed in his sport the same thoroughness and love of perfection that he displayed in everything else.  His stables were filled with the best horses that Virginia could furnish.  There were the “blooded coach-horses” for Mrs. Washington’s carriage, “Magnolia,” a full-blooded Arabian, used by his owner for the road, the ponies for the children, and finally, the high-bred hunters Chinkling and Valiant, Ajax and Blueskin, and the rest, all duly set down in the register in the handwriting of the master himself.  His first visit in the morning was to the stables; the next to the kennels to inspect and criticise the hounds, also methodically registered and described, so that we can read the names of Vulcan and Ringwood, Singer and Truelove, Music and Sweetlips, to which the Virginian woods once echoed nearly a century and a half ago.  His hounds were the subject of much thought, and were so constantly and critically drafted as to speed, keenness, and bottom, that when in full cry they ran so closely bunched that tradition says, in classic phrase, they could have been covered with a blanket.  The hounds met three times a week in the season, usually at Mount Vernon, sometimes at Belvoir.  They would get off at daybreak, Washington in the midst of his hounds, splendidly mounted, generally on his favorite Blueskin, a powerful iron-gray horse of great speed and endurance.  He wore a blue coat, scarlet waistcoat, buckskin breeches, and a velvet cap.  Closely followed by his huntsman and the neighboring gentlemen, with the ladies, headed, very likely, by Mrs. Washington in a scarlet habit, he would ride to the appointed covert and throw in.  There was no difficulty in finding, and then away they would go, usually after a gray fox, sometimes after a big black fox, rarely to be caught.  Most of the country was wild and unfenced, rough in footing, and offering hard and dangerous going for the horses, but Washington always made it a rule to stay with his hounds.  Cautious or timid riders, if they were so minded, could gallop along the wood roads with the ladies, and content themselves with glimpses of the hunt, but the master rode at the front.  The fields, it is to be feared, were sometimes small, but Washington hunted even if he had only his stepson or was quite alone.