His experience with the cellar well was hardly less successful than that of his friend, James Madison, on a like occasion. Madison had an ice house filled with ice, and a skeptical overseer wagered a turkey against a mint julep that by the fourth of July the ice would all have disappeared. The day came, they opened the house, and behold there was enough ice for exactly one julep! Truly a sad situation when there were two Virginia gentlemen.
Mention of Madison in this connection calls to mind the popular notion that it was his wife Dolly who invented ice-cream. I believe that her biographers claim for her the credit of the discovery. The rôle of the iconoclast is a thankless one and I confess to a liking for Dolly, but I have discovered in Washington's cash memorandum book under date of May 17, 1784, the entry: "By a Cream Machine for Ice," £1.13.4--that is an ice-cream freezer. The immortal Dolly was then not quite twelve years old.
Washington seems to have owned three coaches. The first he ordered in London in 1758 in preparation for his marriage. It was to be fashionable, genteel and of seasoned wood; the body preferably green, with a light gilding on the mouldings, with other suitable ornaments including the Washington arms. It was sent with high recommendations, but proved to be of badly seasoned material, so that the panels shrunk and slipped out of the mouldings within two months and split from end to end, much to his disgust. Such a chariot was driven not with lines from a driver's box, but by liveried postillions riding on horseback, one horseman to each span.
The second coach he had made in Philadelphia in 1780 at a cost of two hundred and ten pounds in specie. It was decidedly better built.
The last was a coach, called "the White Chariot," bought second hand soon after he became President. It was built by Clarke, of Philadelphia, and was a fine vehicle, with a cream-colored body and wheels, green Venetian blinds and the Washington arms painted upon the doors. In this coach, drawn by six horses, he drove out in state at Philadelphia and rode to and from Mount Vernon, occasionally suffering an upset on the wretched roads. It was strong and of good workmanship and its maker heard with pride that it had made the long southern tour of 1791 without starting a nail or a screw. This coach was purchased at the sale of the General's effects by George Washington Parke Custis and later in a curious manner fell into the possession of Bishop Meade, who ultimately made it up into walking sticks, picture frames, snuff boxes and such mementoes.
At Mount Vernon to-day the visitor is shown a coach which the official Handbook states is vouched for as the original "White Chariot." In reality it seems to be the coach once owned by the Powell family of Philadelphia. It is said to have been built by the same maker and on the same lines, and Washington may have ridden in it, but it never belonged to him.
Most people think of Washington as a marble statue on a pedestal rather than as a being of flesh and blood with human feelings, faults and virtues. He was self-contained, he was not voluble, he had a sense of personal dignity, but underneath he was not cold. He was really hot-tempered and on a few well-authenticated occasions fell into passions in which he used language that would have blistered the steel sides of a dreadnaught. Yet he was kind-hearted, he pitied the weak and sorrowful, and the list of his quiet benefactions would fill many pages and cost him thousands of pounds. He was even full of sentiment in some matters; on more than one occasion he provided positions that enabled young friends or relatives to marry, and I shrewdly suspect that he engineered matters so that the beloved Nelly Custis obtained a good husband in the person of his nephew, Lawrence Lewis. I might say much more tending to show his human qualities, but I shall add only this: Having for many years studied his career from every imaginable point of view, I give it as my deliberate opinion that perhaps no man ever lived who was more considerate of the rights and feelings of others. Not even Lincoln had a bigger heart.