We can go to Mount Vernon by boat, or over a road which Congress has repeatedly, but without effect, been petitioned to acquire and improve. Already a trolley company has recognized a public demand and is running cars on a regular schedule from the heart of the capital city to the borders of Washington’s old estate. On the way down we pass Wellington, once the home of Tobias Lear, whom General Washington hired for two hundred dollars a year to act as tutor to the children at Mount Vernon, promoting him later to the post of private secretary. In both capacities, his employer provided, he “will sit at my table, will live as I live, will mix with the company who resort to the house, and will be treated in every respect with courtesy and proper attention.” Lear married three wives, one of them a kinswoman of the General’s. He acquired means, removed in later life to Washington, and became a merchant with a warehouse on the river. His tombstone in the Congressional Cemetery recites an overflowing list of his virtues and honors, and posterity owes him a large debt for having preserved many of the Washingtoniana most valued now by historians. Mount Vernon became the property of the Washington family by a grant from Lord Culpepper in 1670 to John Washington, the great-grandfather of George. It was christened in honor of Admiral Vernon, a friend of Lawrence Washington, the half-brother who brought George up and superintended his education. George, who received it by inheritance, willed it to his nephew Bushrod, he to his nephew John, and John to a son of the same name. Financial embarrassments led the last heir to part with some of the land; but to an area of a few hundred acres, including the mansion, the family tomb, and the wharf on the Potomac, he held fast till arrangements could be made for its purchase by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, a society of patriotic women who, with money privately raised, have restored the place and kept it in order ever since. There is good reason to doubt whether this would ever have come about but for the heroic energy of Miss Ann Pamela Cunningham of South Carolina, who, though a confirmed invalid, devised and executed a plan which saved the estate from being sold to a professional showman.