exclaimed; and then drawing back with a stare of wonder, ‘Have I the honor of addressing General Washington?’ With a smile whose expression of benevolence I have rarely seen equaled, he offered his hand and replied:  ’An odd sort of introduction, Mr. Bernard; but I am pleased to find you can play so active a part in private, and without a prompter.’” So they rode on together to the house and had a chat, to which we must recur further on.

There is no contemporary narrative of which I am aware that shows Washington to us more clearly than this little adventure with Bernard, for it is in the common affairs of daily life that men come nearest to each other, and the same rule holds good in history.  We know Washington much better from these few lines of description left by a chance acquaintance on the road than we do from volumes of state papers.  It is such a pleasant story, too.  There is the great man, retired from the world, still handsome and imposing in his old age, with the strong and ready hand to succor those who had fallen by the wayside; there are the genuine hospitality, the perfect manners, and the well-turned little sentence with which he complimented the actor, put him at his ease, and asked him to his house.  Nothing can well be added to the picture of Washington as we see him here, not long before the end of all things came.  We must break off, however, from the quiet charm of home life, and turn again briefly to the affairs of state.  Let us, therefore, leave these two riding along the road together in the warm Virginia sunshine to the house which has since become one of the Meccas of humanity, in memory of the man who once dwelt in it.

The highly prized retirement to Mount Vernon did not now, more than at any previous time, separate Washington from the affairs of the country.  He continued to take a keen interest in all that went on, to correspond with his friends, and to use his influence for what he thought wisest and best for the general welfare.  These were stirring times, too, and the progress of events brought him to take a more active part than he had ever expected to play again; for France, having failed, thanks to his policy, to draw us either by fair words or trickery from our independent and neutral position, determined, apparently, to try the effect of force and ill usage.  Pinckney, sent out as minister, had been rebuffed; and then Adams, with the cordial support of the country, had made another effort for peace by sending Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry as a special commission.  The history of that commission is one of the best known episodes in our history.  Our envoys were insulted, asked for bribes, and browbeaten, until the two who retained a proper sense of their own and their country’s dignity took their passports and departed.  The publication of the famous X, Y, Z letters, which displayed the conduct of France, roused a storm of righteous indignation from one end of the United States to the other.  The party of France and of the opposition bent before the storm, and the Federalists were at last all-powerful.  A cry for war went up from every corner, and Congress provided rapidly for the formation of an army and the beginning of a navy.