Page:The Ladies of the White House.djvu/96

80 worthy families. There must be more than twenty apartments, most of them small and plain in finish. The narrow doors and wide fire-places are the ensigns of a past age and many years of change, but are eloquent in their obsoleteness.

The library which ordinarily is the most interesting room in any house, should be doubly so in this home of Washington's; but, bare of all save the empty cases in the wall, it is the gloomiest of all. Books all gone, and the occupation of the room by the present residents deprives it of any attractions it might otherwise have. Here, early in the morning and late at night, he worked continuously, keeping up his increasing correspondence and managing his vast responsibilities.

Murmurs of another war reached him as he sat at his table planning rural improvements, and from this room he wrote accepting the position no other could fill while he lived.

Here death found him, the night before his last illness, when cold and hoarse he came in from his lone ride, and warmed himself by his library fire. That night he went up to his room over this favorite study, and said in reply to a member of his family as he passed out, who urged him to do something for it, "No, you know I never take any thing for a cold. Let it go as it came."

The winds and rains of eighty-odd years have beaten upon that sacred home on the high banks of the silvery waters beneath, since the widowed, weary wife was laid