he grist mill and later a distillery and the
famous sixteen-sided "new circular barn, now finishing on a new
construction; well calculated, it is conceived, for getting grain out
of the straw more expeditiously than the usual mode of threshing." It
had a two-room overseer's house, covering for forty odd negroes, and
sheds sufficient for thirty work horses and oxen. Washington considered
it much the best of all his farms. It was this farm that he bequeathed
to Nelly Custis and her husband, Lawrence Lewis, and upon it they
erected "Woodlawn," which is shown in the photograph herewith
reproduced.

Not long since I rambled on foot over the old estate and had an
opportunity to compare the reality, or what remains of it, with
Washington's description. I left the Mansion House, often visited
before, and strolled down the long winding drive that runs between the
stunted evergreens and oaks through the old lodge gate and passed from
the domain, kept trim and parklike by the Association, out upon the
unkempt and vastly greater part of the old Mount Vernon.

It was early morning, about the hour when in the long past the master of
the estate used to ride out on his tour of inspection. The day was one
of those delicious days in early autumn when earth and sky and air and
all things in nature seem kindly allied to help the heart of man leap up
in gladness and to enable him to understand how there came to be a poet
called Wordsworth. Meadow-larks were singing in the grass, and once in
an old hedgerow over-grown with sweet-smelling wild honeysuckle I saw a
covey of young quails. These hedgerows of locust and cedar are broken
now, but along the old road to the mill and Pohick Church and between
fields the scattered trees and now and then a bordering ditch are
evidences of the old owner's handiwork.

Then and later I visited all the farms, the site of the old mill, of
which only a few stones remain, the mill stream, the fishery and old
ferry landing. I walked across the gullied fields and examined the soil,
I noted the scanty crops they bear to-day and gained a clearer idea of
what Washington's problem had been than I could have done from a
library of books.

Truly the estate is "pleasantly situated," though even to-day it seems
out of the world and out of the way. One must go far to find so
satisfying a view as that from the old Mansion House porch across the
mile of shining water to the Maryland hills' crowned with trees
glorified