the problem. There was, as he said,
"an inexhaustible fund" of it, but the task of getting it on the land
was a heavy one. Having heard of a horse-power dredge called the
_Hippopotamus_ that was in use on the Delaware River, he made inquiries
concerning it but feared that it would not serve his purpose, as he
would have to go from one hundred to eight hundred or a thousand yards
from high water-mark for the mud--too far out for a horse to be
available. Mechanical difficulties and the cost of getting up the mud
proved too great for him--as they have proved too great even down to the
present--but he never gave up the idea and from time to time tried
experiments with small plots of ground that had been covered with the
mud. His enthusiasm on the subject was so great that Noah Webster, of
dictionary fame, who visited him in this period, says that the standing
toast at Mount Vernon was "Success to the mud!"

Every scientific agriculturist knows that erosion is one of the chief
causes of loss in soil fertility and that in the basins and deltas of
streams and rivers there is going to waste enough muck to make all of
our land rich. But the cost of getting this fertility back to the soil
has thus far proved too great for us to undertake the task of
restoration. It is conceivable, however, that the time may come when we
shall undertake the work in earnest and then the dream of Washington
will be realized.

The spring and summer of 1785 proved excessively dry, and the crops
suffered, as they always do in times of drought. The wheat yield was
poor and chinch bugs attacked the corn in such myriads that our Farmer
found "hundreds of them & their young under the blades and at the lower
joints of the Stock." By the middle of August "Nature had put on a
melancholy look." The corn was "_fired_ in most places to the Ear, with
little appearance of yielding if Rain should now come & a certainty of
making nothing if it did not."

Like millions of anxious farmers before and after him, he watched
eagerly for the rain that came not. He records in his diary that on
August 17th a good deal of rain fell far up the river, but as for his
fields--it tantalizingly passed by on the other side, and "not enough
fell here to wet a handkerchief." On the eighteenth, nineteenth and
twenty-second clouds and thunder and lightning again awakened hopes but
only slight sprinkles resulted. On the twenty-seventh nature at last
relented and, to his great satisfac