Sniffle from Rhoda.

"Yes," said the old lady, snappishly; "almost! But I never did do it yet."

"Did you ever see Gineral Washin'ton, mem?" Rhoda asked. "I thought, maybe, you was old enough. Misc Somers, she see him up yer to Kint River a-crossin' to 'Napolis. He was a-swarin' at the cappen of the piriauger and a dammin' of the Eas'n Shu, and he said they wan't no good rudes in Marylan' nohow; that the Wes'n Shu was all red mud, an' the Eas'n Shu yaller mud, an' the bay was jus' pizen. Misc Somers say she don't think it was Gineral Washin'ton, caze he cuss so. She goin' to find out when she kin git a book an' somebody to read outen it to her, caze she dreffle smart."

"Grand-aunt Tilghman," Vesta interposed to the blank silence of the room, "knew General Washington intimately."

"Do tell us!" cried Rhoda. "You kin be a right interestin' ole woman, I reckon, ef you air so quar."

In the midst of a smile, in which the blind old lady herself joined, and Mrs. Custis at the same time entered the room, Mrs. Tilghman spoke as follows:

"I went to visit Cousin Martha Washington several years before the Revolution, at Mount Vernon. I had seen her while she was the widow of Cousin Custis, and we occasionally corresponded. In those days we visited by vessel, so a schooner of Robert Morris's father set me ashore at Mount Vernon. Colonel Washington was then having his first portrait painted by Wilson Peale, and he was forty years old. Peale and Washington used to pitch the bar, play quoits, and fox-hunt, while Cousin Martha, who was only three months younger than the colonel, knitted and cut out sewing for her colored girls, and heard her daughter, Martha Custis, play the harpsichord. Poor Martha had the consumption; she was dark as an Indian; Washington often carried her along the piazza and into the beautiful woodlands near the house; but she died, leaving him all her money - nearly twenty thousand dollars. We Custises rather looked down on Colonel Washington in those days; he was not of the old gentry; his poor mother could barely read and write, and once, when we went to Fredericksburg to see her, she was riding out in the field among her few negroes as her own overseer, wearing an old sun-bonnet, and sunburned like a forester."

"Dear me!" exclaimed Mrs. Custis. "I should think she was a great impediment to Washington."

"I reckon that's the way her son got big," exclaimed Rhoda; "if his mar had laid down in bed all day, he couldn't have killed King George so easy with his swurd."