“Ninety-six! Boys, give three cheers for ninety-six!” he cried, and so rode on to his death. Perhaps she waved a small flag at him, but this one thing we know, that until Barbara Fritchie, who died on the 18th of December of that year, and Stonewall Jackson met in Whittier’s stirring ballad, they never met at all. Those who honor the memory of a brave Christian soldier are glad that the story is not true; those who see in the poem an incident too picturesque to be willingly lost from the story of the war, are sorry that it is not; but all who have seen the valley will be for ever grateful for the perfect picture of its loveliness. Clinging to its old faiths, its old churches, its old traditions, its old customs; clinging to its old houses, its old mahogany and china and portraits, its sweet old gardens and its sweeter friendliness and helpfulness and loyalty, the generations come and go. “And ever the stars above look down On the stars below in Frederick town.” [Illustration: THE HATED BRITISH TAX-STAMP, 1765-1766.] [Illustration] WASHINGTON THE NATION’S CAPITAL BY FRANK A. VANDERLIP Many generations before George Washington, as the New World Romulus, paced off in person the metes and bounds of the Federal City, the powerful Algonquin tribe of American Indians had established their capital within the confines of what is now the District of Columbia. Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas, conducted, with his eighty painted chiefs, his savage councils of war, or peaceably smoked his calumet within view of the hill destined to become the site of the forum of the Republic. Nacochtank, afterwards Latinized as Anacostan by the Jesuit fathers who accompanied Lord Baltimore to Maryland, and now called Anacostia, a suburb of Washington, was the precise location of Powhatan’s wigwam capital. The first white man to approach the seat of government of these barbarian warriors was Captain John Smith, who sailed up the “Patawomeke” in 1608. The famous adventurer only partially explored the country, the principal item in the log-book of his voyage being that he found the river “full of luscious fish and its shores lined with ferocious savages.”