After the expiration of his second term, he again returned to the banks of the Potomac and resumed the occupations he laid down eight years before. Writing to a friend soon after his arrival, he tells him that he “began his daily course with the rising of the sun and first made preparations for the business of the day. By the time I have accomplished these matters breakfast is ready. This being over, I mount my horse and ride around my farms, which employs me till it is time to dress for dinner, at which I rarely miss to see some strange faces, come, as they say, out of respect for me.” The farm was over eight thousand acres in extent, and these rides averaged twelve or fifteen miles in length. This description of Washington at the time was given by young Custis to a gentleman who had inquired for him: “You will meet with an old gentleman riding alone, in plain drab clothes, a broad-brimmed white hat, a hickory switch in his hand and carrying an umbrella with a long staff which is attached to his saddle-bow. That person, sir, is General Washington.” Another call to duty came in the threatened war with France. Washington was made lieutenant-general, but the storm soon blew over.
He was now sixty-eight years old, and the end of all was coming. He rode out as usual one morning in December, caught cold, and died in a few days. The trees he planted in his youth bend above his grave on the banks of the Potomac.
THE PROGRESS OF ATHLETISM.
BY C. TURNER.
ATHLETISM is one of the distinctive forces of the nineteenth century, and of all the forces, acting upon the social, moral and physical life of the century, it is probably destined to be the most permanent in its effects. No impulse has had a swifter or a wider scope. While other forces of aggregation have welded together peoples having a common ethnological origin into a nation, such as Italy, and consolidated independent states into a system, such as Germany, it has been the function of athletics to unite in a common interest the whole (Anglo-Saxon) world. America and Australasia have felt its influence, and passed under its discipline, in no less degree than the scattered colonies and dependencies of “Greater Britain.” Remarkable as it may at first sound, it is true, that no fact to-day “flashed round the girdle of the globe” would excite so widespread a curiosity, or so much personal interest, as that an amateur athlete had succeeded in covering one hundred yards of space in one second less than the recorded time of the great classic contests of the century.
THE HURDLE RACE AT CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY.
In the United Kingdom, Ministries may come and Ministries may go, Governments may wax and wane; such news will interest few but the inhabitants of Great Britain. In America contests of deep interest may rage round a Presidential Election and rend public opinion, but the very knowledge of the contest will be confined largely to the American continent. The fiercest controversies in science and religion may rise and subside, the whole current of ecclesiastical thought may change, whilst the “Tracts for the Times” will remain a mere phrase to the millions who are keenly alive to the more cosmopolitan questions involved in athletism. On the remote sheep-farms of Australia, in the cattle ranches of Texas, on the pampas of South America, amongst the snows of the Himalayas, round the kraal fires of Southern Africa and in the busy marts of China and Japan, there will be auditors who will gather with keener interest to hear of the battles of pluck and endurance by the Isis and the Cam than would be displayed about any contest for dominion among the powers of the world. In the island home of its birth, and the land of its most earnest adoption, no system of news, in its ingathering and dispersion, is so regular, systematic and universal, or so anxiously scanned as the sports of the Queen’s Club Grounds, or the progress of the baseball nines of New York, Boston or Chicago. It puts into operation a system as perfect and as rapid as if the fate of nations hung in the balance.