Page:The youth of Washington (1910).djvu/17

 THE YOUTH OF WASHINGTON

DIARY—NOVEMBER, 1797

I

MY retirement from official duties as President has enabled me to restore order on my plantations, and in some degree to repair the neglected buildings which are fallen to decay. The constant coming of guests—moved, I fear, more by curiosity than by other reasons—is diminished owing to snows, unusual at this period of the year.

Owing to these favouring conditions, I have now some small leisure to reflect on a life which has been too much one of action and of public interests to admit, hitherto, of that kind of retrospection which is natural, and, as it seems to me, fitting in a man of my years, who has little to look forward to and much to look back upon.