also I was somewhat like him in my mind and character.
When in later years I returned to visit Wakefield I used to fancy I remembered it. This I could not have done, as I was only three years old when, because of the unhealthfulness of the place, my father moved away. The house was burned down on Christmas eve, 1779. It was of wood, with brick foundations, and had eight bedrooms. There was an underground dairy, a great garden with fig-trees and other fruit, and along the shores were wild flowering grapes and laurel and honeysuckle and sweetbrier roses, very fragrant in the spring season. Here in the middle of a great field lie my ancestors and some of the children of my father's first marriage.
In the year 1735 we moved, as I have said, fifty miles higher up the Potomac to the estate then known as Epsewasson or Hunting Creek. This was given, with other land, by the colony to my great-grandfather and Colonel Spencer for importing an hundred labourers, and was bought by my father in 1726 from my aunt Mildred Gregory, later my godmother. It came afterwards to be called Mount Vernon. It was at that time
