Westmoreland County, and there he worked, first as laborer and then as
overseer, for nigh upon ten years. His master treated him with great
kindness, and at the Restoration, having made tenfold his purchase money
by him, gave him back his freedom.

Despite the years and the hard work in the tobacco-fields, Stewart's
thoughts had often been with the wife and children he had left behind in
Scotland, and he prevailed upon Spenser to secure him passage in one of
his ships for London, where he arrived early in 1662. He made his way
back to Kincardine, where he found his estate sequestered, his wife and
one child dead in poverty, the other disappeared. From a neighbor he
learned that the boy had run away to sea after his mother's death, but
what his fate had been he never knew. Weary and disheartened, Stewart
retraced his steps to London, and after overcoming obstacles innumerable,
occasioned mostly by his want of money, laid his case before the king.
Charles listened to him kindly enough, for his office had not yet grown a
burden to him, and finally granted him a patent for two thousand acres of
land along the upper Potomac. It was a gift which cost the king nothing,
and one of a hundred such he bestowed upon his favorites as another man
would give a crust of bread for which he had no use. Stewart returned to
Virginia with his patent in his pocket, and built himself a home in what
was then a wilderness.

In five or six years he had cleared near three hundred acres of land, had
it planted in sweet-scented tobacco, for which the Northern Neck was
always famous, bought two-score negroes to tend it, and began to see
light ahead. It was at this time that he met Marjorie Usner, while on a
visit to Williamsburg, and he married her in 1670, having in the mean
time erected a more spacious residence than the rude log-hut which had
previously been his home. He was at that time a man nigh fifty years of