Excerpt from Mount Vernon and Its Associations, Historical, Biographical, and Pictorial And so this work has become a most rare and precious depository of the likenesses of things once associated with the person of the Beloved Patriot, and of facts having the same relation. But for it, all semblance of such objects would have passed from the memory of men and been lost forever. The reader will bear in mind that when persons or things are spoken of in the body of the work, in the present tense, the time is the year 1859, when the collection and arrangement of the materials were first made. The writer revisited Mount Vernon and Arlington House early in 1870, and has added many pages of interesting matter to the original collection, making, it is believed, a complete reliquary of Washington and his Home. He found the aspect of Mount Vernon very little changed. But the beautiful grounds around Arlington House had been converted into a burial place for many thousands of the young men of the Country who perished while striving to save the imperilled life of the Republic. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.