“Last evening arrived in this city, on his way to Mount Vernon, the illustrious object of veneration and gratitude, GEORGE WASHINGTON.  His excellency was accompanied by his lady and Miss Custis, and by the son of the unfortunate Lafayette and his preceptor.  At a distance from the city, he was met by a crowd of citizens, on horse and foot, who thronged the road to greet him, and by a detachment from Captain Hollingsworth’s troop, who escorted him in through as great a concourse of people as Baltimore ever witnessed.  On alighting at the Fountain Inn, the general was saluted with reiterated and thundering huzzas from the spectators.  His excellency, with the companions of his journey, leaves town, we understand, this morning.”

Thus with the cheers and the acclamations still ringing in his ears he came home again to Mount Vernon, where he found at once plenty of occupation, which in some form was always a necessity to him.  An absence of eight years had not improved the property.  On April 3 he wrote to McHenry:  “I find myself in the situation nearly of a new beginner; for, although I have not houses to build (except one, which I must erect for the accommodation and security of my military, civil, and private papers, which are voluminous and may be interesting), yet I have scarcely anything else about me that does not require considerable repairs.  In a word, I am already surrounded by joiners, masons, and painters; and such is my anxiety to get out of their hands, that I have scarcely a room to put a friend into or to sit in myself without the music of hammers or the odoriferous scent of paint.”  He easily dropped back into the round of country duties and pleasures, and the care of farms and plantations, which had always had for him so much attraction.  “To make and sell a little flour annually,” he wrote to Wolcott, “to repair houses going fast to ruin, to build one for the security of my papers of a public nature, will constitute employment for the few years I have to remain on this terrestrial globe.”  Again he said to McHenry:  “You are at the source of information, and can find many things to relate, while I have nothing to say that would either inform or amuse a secretary of war at Philadelphia.  I might tell him that I begin my diurnal course with the sun; that if my hirelings are not in their places by that time I send them messages of sorrow for their indisposition; that having put these wheels in motion I examine the state of things further; that the more they are probed the deeper I find the wounds which my buildings have sustained by an absence and neglect of eight years; that by the time I have accomplished these matters breakfast (a little after seven o’clock, about the time I presume that you are taking leave of Mrs. McHenry) is ready; that this being over I mount my horse and ride round my farms, which employs me until it is time to dress for dinner, at which I rarely miss seeing strange faces, come, as they say, out of respect for