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to the Springs, suggested that they be escorted by his youngest son, saying: “A young gentleman who has read Virgil must surely be competent to take care of two ladies, for before I had advanced that far I was my mother's outdoor agent and confidential messenger.
Your father [G. W. P. Custis] must have a pleasant time at Jamestown, judging from the newspaper report of the celebration.
Tell him I at last have a prospect of getting a puss.
I have heard of a batch of kittens at a settler's town on the river, and have the promise of one.
I have stipulated if not entirely yellow, it must at least have some yellow in the composition of the color of its coat; but how I shall place it-when I get it-and my mouse on amicable terms I do not know.”
In a letter dated Camp Cooper, June 22, 1857, he tells his wife again of the sickness of the troops and of the death of a little boy, the son of a sergeant, about one year old. “His father came to me,” he writes, “with the tears flowing down his cheeks, and asked me to read the funeral services over his body, which I did at the grave for the second time in my life.
I hope I will not be asked again; for, though I must believe it is far better for the child to be called by its heavenly Creator into his presence in its purity and innocence, unpolluted by sin and uncontaminated by the vices of the world, still, it so wrings a parent's heart with anguish that it is painful to see. Yet I know it was done in mercy to both.
The child has been saved from all misery and sin here.
The father has been given a touching appeal and powerful inducement to prepare for hereafter.”
In the summer of 1857, Colonel Johnston being ordered to report to Washington for the purpose of taking charge of the Utah expedition, Lieutenant-Colonel Lee assumed command of his regiment.
The death of his father-in-law, Mr. Custis, recalled him to Arlington in the fall of that year; but he returned as soon as possible to his regimental headquarters in Texas.
The death of the “adopted son of Washington,” October 10, 1857, in his seventy-sixth year, was greatly deplored.
His unbounded hospitality was as broad as his acres, and his vivid recollections of the Father of his Country,
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