Washington’s last days, like those that preceded them in the course of a long and well-spent life, were devoted to constant and careful employment.  His correspondence both at home and abroad was immense.  Yet no letter was unanswered.  One of the best-bred men of his time, Washington deemed it a grave offense against the rules of good manners and propriety to leave letters unanswered.  He wrote with great facility, and it would be a difficult matter to find another who had written so much, who had written so well.  General Harry Lee once observed to him, “We are amazed, sir, at the vast amount of work you get through.”  Washington answered, “Sir, I rise at four o’clock, and a great deal of my work is done while others sleep.”

He was the most punctual of men, as we said.  To this admirable quality of rising at four and retiring to rest at nine at all seasons, this great man owed his ability to accomplish mighty labors during his long and illustrious life.  He was punctual in everything, and made everyone about him punctual.  So careful a man delighted in always having about him a good timekeeper.  In Philadelphia the first President regularly walked up to his watchmaker’s to compare his watch with the regulator.  At Mount Vernon the active yet punctual farmer invariably consulted the dial when returning from his morning ride, and before entering his house.

The affairs of the household took order from the master’s accurate and methodical arrangement of time.  Even the fisherman on the river watched for the cook’s signal when to pull in shore and deliver his catch in time for dinner.

Among the picturesque objects on the Potomac, to be seen from the eastern portion of the mansion house, was the light canoe of the house’s fisher.  Father Jack was an African, an hundred years of age, and although enfeebled in body by weight of years, his mind possessed uncommon vigor.  And he would tell of days long past, when, under African suns, he was made captive, and of the terrible battle in which his royal sire was slain, the village burned, and himself sent to the slave ship.

Father Jack had in a considerable degree a leading quality of his race—­somnolency.  Many an hour could the family of Washington see the canoe fastened to a stake, with the old fisherman bent nearly double enjoying a nap, which was only disturbed by the jerking of the white perch caught on his hook.  But, as we just said, the domestic duties of Mount Vernon were governed by clock time, and the slumbers of fisher Jack might occasion inconvenience, for the cook required the fish at a certain hour, so that they might be served smoking hot precisely at three.  At times he would go to the river bank and make the accustomed signals, and meet with no response.  The old fisherman would be quietly reposing in his canoe, rocked by the gentle undulations of the stream, and dreaming, no doubt, of events “long time ago.”  The importune master of the kitchen, grown ferocious by delay, would now rush up and down the water’s edge, and, by dint of loud shouting, cause the canoe to turn its prow to the shore.  Father Jack, indignant at its being supposed he was asleep at his post, would rate those present on his landing, “What you all meck such a debil of a noise for, hey?  I wa’nt sleep, only noddin’.”