. The home of Washington; or, Mount Vernon and its associations, historical, biographical, and pictorial . now, we have noinformation. Washington carried withhim to Mount Yernon, withthe key of the Bastile, apair of elegant pistols, which, withequally elegant holsters, had beenpresented to him by the Count deMoustier, the French minister, as atoken of his personal regard. Theseweapons, it is believed, are the ones pre-sented by Washington to Col. Samuel Hay,of the tenth Pennsylvanian regiment, whostood high in the esteem of his bear the well-known cipher of Wash-ington, and were
. The home of Washington; or, Mount Vernon and its associations, historical, biographical, and pictorial . now, we have noinformation. Washington carried withhim to Mount Yernon, withthe key of the Bastile, apair of elegant pistols, which, withequally elegant holsters, had beenpresented to him by the Count deMoustier, the French minister, as atoken of his personal regard. Theseweapons, it is believed, are the ones pre-sented by Washington to Col. Samuel Hay,of the tenth Pennsylvanian regiment, whostood high in the esteem of his bear the well-known cipher of Wash-ington, and were purchased at the sale ofColonel Hays effects, after his death in No-vember, 1803, by John Y. Baldwin, of xTew-ark, New Jersey. His son, J. O. Baldwin,presented one of them to Isaac I. Green-wood, of New York, in 1825, in whose pos-session it remains, the other having beenlost on the occasion of a fire which destroyedthe residence of his mother. Our engravingrepresents the preserved one. Mr. Baldwin relates the following anecdote in connectionwith these pistols:—Wlien I was a boy, he says, my father. Washingtons pistol. AND ITS ASSOCIATIONS. 241 would frequently take up the AiLvora^ a newspaper then pub-lished in Philadelphia, and marking oflf about twenty lines,would say, [Now, Joseph, if you read those correctly, andwithout a single mistake, you shall fire off one of Washing-tons pistols. Such a promise was a high incentive, and if thetask was fairly accomplished, my mother would take off herthimble to measure the charge, and my father, having loadedthe pistol, I would go to the backdoor with an exultingheart, and lifting the weapon on high, tightly grasped withboth hands, pull the trigger. While at Mount Yernon in the autumn of 1790, Washingtonreceived from the Count DEstaing a small bust of M. Necker,the French minister of finance, or comptroller-general, whenthe French Revolution broke out in 1789. James Neckerwas a native of Geneva, in Switzerland. He went to Franceas am
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Keywords: ., bookauthorlossingb, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, bookyear1870
