but Virginia has given us eight.  The first British army to land on this continent (Braddock’s) landed in Virginia, and in that State our two greatest wars were terminated by the surrenders of Cornwallis and of Lee.  And, last, the gallant Lee himself was a Virginian of the Virginians—­a son of the distinguished Henry Lee who said of Washington that he was “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

* * * * *

On the pleasant drive of perhaps a dozen miles, from Harper’s Ferry to Charles Town, I noticed here and there, at the roadside, pyramidal stones, suggesting monuments, but bearing no inscription save that each had a number.  On inquiry I learned that these were indeed Confederate monuments, but that to find out what they marked it was necessary to go to the county courthouse at Charles Town and look up the numbers in a book, of which there is but one copy.  These monuments were set out three or four years ago.  They appeared suddenly, almost as though they had grown overnight, and many people wondered, as I had, what they meant.

“Eloise,” one Charles Town young lady asked another, “what’s that monument out in front of your house with the number twenty-one on it?”

“Oh,” replied Eloise, “that’s where all my suitors are buried.”

* * * * *

One of the things which gives Jefferson County, West Virginia, its Virginian flavor is the collection of fine old houses which adorn it.  Many of these houses are the homes of families bearing the name of Washington, or having in their veins the blood of the Washingtons.  It is said that there is more Washington blood in Charles Town (which, by the way, should not be confused with Charleston, capital of the same State), than in any other place, if not in all the rest of the world together.  The nearest competitors to Charles Town in this respect are Westmoreland County, Virginia, and the town of Kankakee, Illinois, where resides the Spottswood Augustine Washington family, said to be the only Washington group to have taken the Union side in the Civil War.  It is rumored also that all the Washingtons are Democrats, although that fact is hard to reconcile, at the present time, with the statement that, among the five thousand of them, there is but a single Federal officeholder.

The settling of the Washingtons in Jefferson County, West Virginia, came about through the fact that George Washington, when a youth of sixteen or seventeen, became acquainted with that part of what was then Virginia, through having gone to survey for Lord Fairfax, who had acquired an enormous tract of land in the neighboring county of Clarke, which is still in the mother State.  To this estate, called Greenaway Court, his lordship, it is recorded, came from England to isolate himself because a woman with whom he was in love refused to marry him.

In this general neighborhood George Washington lived for three years, and local enthusiasts affirm that to his having drunk the lime-impregnated waters of this valley was due his great stature.  The man who informed me of this theory had lived there aways.  He was about five feet three inches tall, and had drunk the waters all his life—­plain and otherwise.