Note 138 — Chapter XLII
Reading edition
In a letter to General Hamilton, written a month afterward, Mr. Lear says: “To Judge Washington the general left by will all his public and private papers. A few hours before his death he observed to him—'I am about to change the scene. I can not last long. I believed from the first the attack would be fatal. Do you arrange all my papers and accounts, as you know more about these things than any one else.'”—Works of Hamilton, vi. 424. There must have been a change of the word me to him, in transcribing this letter for the press, because in no account is the judge mentioned as having been present during Washington's last sickness.