and having obtained the young lady's and her parents' consent, we are to be married on the 17th instant. Col. Cary wears the same coat-of-arms as Lord Hunsden."

George William Fairfax expected to become Lord Fairfax some day, though the expectation was never realized, and Sally Cary never became Lady Fairfax; but there seems to have been more wisdom than passion in the match, and Mrs. Sally Nelson Robins, historian of the Colonial Dames, is moved to sneer at Fairfax as "a deliberate unemotional gentleman. Arms and amiable person, forsooth! For marriages of 'convenance' and neat calculation commend me to these Colonial Virginians; Miss Cary's beauty and fortune and George William Fairfax's position and expectations, plus the arms of Lord Hunsden, equals matrimony!"

When Fairfax brought his bride to Belvoir, her pretty sister, Mary Cary, came along. George Washington also returned, with his heart broken by a heartless Lowland lady. Belvoir must have been a crowded house at that time, for it had only two stories, with four rooms on the first floor and five on the second."

Across a little stretch of water Mount Vernon was visible, but George Washington spent most of his time at Belvoir making a noble effort to fight off despair. Mary Cary gave him excellent help.

They formed a strange community, those old Virginiars with their stately mansions rising here and there in a wilderness yet unconquered; with their arms and their titles and their carriages, their slaves and their aristocracy set in a jungle of pioneering crudities: with their dances, intrigues, love-affairs, and their bad spelling.'

In the dancing, the love-making and the bad spelling, none of them exceeded George Washington.

But he went on with his work as a public surveyor, toil

ing industriously in the wilderness. That it was not all toil is evident from the high spirits shown in his Diary; and that rum was always with him there is evidence enough. There may be reason, therefore, to believe the legend still cherished in West Virginia, then a part of Lord Fairfax's estate, and first settled by Germans from whom he collected quit rents. The story was told during the Washington's Birthday Celebration, February 22, 1926, at Martinsburg, West Virginia, and may well have startled the citizens as much as the newspaper account indicated. The speaker was a prominent attorney, A. C. Nadenbousch, and his speech was thus reported in the Washington Post of February 23, 1926:

"Pointing to a near-by corner, the speaker said the Yellow Tavern, popular with early settlers, once stood there and that one day George Washington, then a young surveyor in the employ of Lord Fairfax, tramped into the tavern and demanded a dram of whisky.

"The liquor was placed before the future leader of the revolution. He drank it down. When he went to pay for it, he found he had no money. Undismayed, young George drew from his bag a coonskin. This was accepted in payment for the drink and the innkeeper returned 158 rabbit skins as change.

"Whether it was the quality of the liquor or the great heap of small 'change' before him, I do not know. But history records that young George felt so elated that he proceeded to treat the crowd, and kept on treating until the last rabbit skin had been returned over the bar.

"Mr. Nadenbousch praised Washington, declaring he was the greatest man this or any other country ever produced, but added that he took no faith in those who tried to picture Washington as a mollycoddle."

IV

HIS "LOWLAND BEAUTY"

O youth of such after fame ever took his puppyloves more seriously, or was more inconstant or more unlucky than George Washington. They drove him as far as the writing of poetry, which was, if possible, worse even than the verses of Abraham Lincoln.1 His own confessions are the authority for most of them. And the list of his hapless loves is long.

3

It begins with the big girl he romped with in school. She might have been Jane Strother, with whom and her sister Alice, the Washington children and their relatives, Lawrence and Robin Washington, played. Other neighbors were the Alexanders, and this juvenile acrostic to "Frances Alexa" might have been written to one of that family:*

"From your bright sparkling Eyes I was undone;
Rays, you have; more transperent than the Sun,
Amidst its glory in the rising day

None can you equal in your bright array;
Constant in your calm and unspotted Mind;
Equal to all, but will to none Prove kind,
So knowing, seldom one so Young, you'l Find.

Ah! woe's me, that I should Love and conceal
Long have I wish'd, but never dare reveal,
Even though severely Loves Pains I feel;
Xerxes that great, was't free from Cupids Dart,
And all the greatest Heroes, felt the smart."

The worse it is as poetry the better it is as humanity, and one may well be glad that it was not even so good as mediocrity. Washington did enough great things greatly; it would have been too much to have him a Byron as well.

Washington's puerile verse is included in a little book that contains also his first entry of a survey, March 11th, 1747/8, when he was sixteen years old. This contains such items as these:

"Read to the Reign of K: John. "In the Spectator Read to 143

"M. The regulator of my watch now is 4m: and over the fifth from the Slow end.

""Twas perfect Love before

But now I do adore

}

S. Young M: A

"Whats the noblest Passion of the Mind. Qy."

Here also is a most doleful elegy of twelve lines and a fine frenzy of grammar and prosody:

"Oh Ye Gods why should my Poor Resistless Heart
Stand to oppose thy might and Power

At Last surrender to cupids feather'd Dart
And now lays Bleeding every Hour

For her that's Pityless of my grief and Woes,
And will not on me Pity take.

I'll sleep amongst my most inveterate Foes
And with gladness never wish to wake,
In deluding sleepings let my Eyelids close
That in an enraptured Dream I may
In a soft lulling sleep and gentle repose
Possess those joys denied by Day."

This is a poem that can be read over and over with delight. One always discovers some new quirk in it. The protestations of abysmal gloom are pure rhetoric-or rather most impure rhetoric. The only thing that reassures us as

to its author's sanity is that it was as insincere as it was bombastic.

For in the same batch of prose, doggerel, and surveying exercises were found three letters invaluable as characterexposure and revealing a heart as hopelessly tangled as his syntax.

It is from these letters that we learn of the girl concealed, perhaps forever, under the haunting phrase, "the Lowland Beauty." Nobody knows who she was, though "half a dozen Virginia families still claim that their ancestress was the lowland beauty." And none of them can prove it.

He had evidently made ardent love to the anonymous girl and been sharply rebuffed, as he was by the girl in the acrostic and the other girl, who would not on him "pity take." But it was always hard for George to give up anything that was dear to him, and he was a glutton for defeat.

He was still smarting with the loss of the Lowland Beauty and the humiliation which must have been conspicuously well known to his friends, and still tingling with desire for her conquest when he went up into Fairfax county to be with his brother Lawrence and the Fairfaxes at Belvoir. Here he was beguiled but not at first consoled by Mary Cary.

He had to put his highly important emotions on paper, and when his delighted pen happened on a phrase that sounded grandiloquent, he felt it too good to use once and throw away; so he repeated it.

By some whim of good luck we have his own copies of three letters he wrote at this time, misspelled, awkward, but exceedingly human and juvenile. There was a certain pomposity in his phraseology, but it was the laughable, loveable monkey-pomposity of a young ape, deliciously but hopelessly perplexed and too headlong for punctuation.