But was this all?  Is it quite true that Washington had only a love of boisterous fun, and nothing else?  It is worth looking a little deeper than the current stories of the camp to find out, and yet one of these very camp-stories raises at once a strong suspicion that Mr. Parton’s conclusion in this regard, like so many conclusions about Washington, is unfounded.  When General Lee took the oath of allegiance to the United States, he remarked, in making abjuration of his former allegiance, that he was perfectly ready to abjure the king, but could not bring himself to abjure the Prince of Wales, at which bit of irony Washington was greatly amused.  The wit of the remark is a little cold to-day, but at the moment, accompanying as it did a solemn act of abjuration, it was keen enough.  Washington himself, moreover, was perfectly capable of good-natured banter.  Colonel Humphreys challenged him one day to jump over a hedge.  Washington, always ready to accept a challenge where riding was concerned, told the colonel to go on.  Humphreys put his horse at the hedge, cleared it, and landed in a quagmire on the other side up to his horse’s girths; whereupon Washington rode up, stopped, and looking blandly at his struggling friend, remarked, “Ah, colonel, you are too deep for me.”  “Take care,” he wrote to young Custis, when he sent him money for his college gown, “not to buy without advice; otherwise you may be more distinguished by your folly than your dress.”

We find in his letters here and there a good-natured raillery, and jesting, which show a sense of humor that goes beyond the limits of mere fun and horse-play.  Here is a letter he wrote toward the close of the war, asking some ladies to dine with him in his quarters at West Point:—­

    “WEST POINT, August 16, 1779.

“Dear Doctor:  I have asked Mrs. Cochran and Mrs. Livingston to dine with me to-morrow; but ought I not to apprise you of their fare?  As I hate deception, even where imagination is concerned, I will.

“It is needless to premise that my table is large enough to hold the ladies:  of this they had ocular demonstration yesterday.  To say how it is usually covered is rather more essential, and this shall be the purport of my letter.

“Since my arrival at this happy spot, we have had a ham, sometimes a shoulder of bacon, to grace the head of the table.  A piece of roast beef adorns the foot, and a small dish of green beans—­almost imperceptible—­decorates the centre.  When the cook has a mind to cut a figure,—­and this I presume he will attempt to-morrow,—­we have two beefsteak pies, or dishes of crabs, in addition, one on each side of the centre dish, dividing the space, and reducing the distance between dish and dish to about six feet, which without them would be nearly twelve feet apart.  Of late he has had the surprising luck to discover that apples will make pies; and it is a question if, amidst the violence of his efforts,