George was not stingy. On the contrary, on each of three plantations which he farmed he kept one crib of corn always set apart for free distribution among the poor, and never let this fail, even if he had to rob his own table supply or to buy corn at a dollar a bushel to make up a deficit. He was not a rich man, but for sentimental reasons held on to Mount Vernon after it had ceased to be profitable property. At his death, he was worth only about seventy-five thousand dollars in his own right, and, had he lived ten years longer at the same rate, he would have died a bankrupt. It was his wife’s better investments that kept up the expenses of their home. As we go over the old mansion, we are shown the various rooms associated with Washington’s activities, and that in which his death occurred. Notwithstanding his sturdy muscular development, his throat and chest were always weak spots; and in 1799, after a soaking and chill from a ride through a December storm, he went to bed with a cold which left him unable to swallow. Soon he realized that the end was not far off. It was characteristic of the man that he should then discharge the doctors from further useless ministrations, give such directions about his burial as he deemed important, and calmly proceed to watch the waning of his own pulse. After a little the hand that held his wrist relaxed and dropped upon the coverlet, and the friends gathered in the chamber knew that all was over. On the Maryland side of the Potomac, the suburb most convenient of access is Georgetown. In fact, it long ago ceased to be strictly a suburb, by incorporation with the city of Washington, from which it was separated only by Rock Creek, a narrow tributary of the Potomac. Officially, it is now West Washington, and its streets have been renamed and renumbered so as to conform as nearly as practicable to the system in use in the capital. All the same, Georgetown has never lost its identity. It had a life of its own before Washington was thought of; and within my recollection the old society of Georgetown used to look askance at the “new people” with whom Washington was filling up. It is still sprinkled with hoary houses set in quaint ancestral gardens, though modernism has touched the place at so many points that we can get a glimpse of these survivals sometimes only through deep vistas lined with the red brick side-walls of urban blocks. The most attractive of the old mansions, and the best preserved, is the Tudor house, built by Doctor William Thornton about 1810. It is a good specimen from the Georgian epoch in architecture, standing fitly in the midst of a great square of lawn, with shade trees and box hedges to correspond; and one of its traditions is that pretty little Nellie Custis went there to her first ball, though--but I leave others to struggle with the problem of conflicting dates. One thing we do know, that the place has always been in the possession of kinsfolk of the Mount Vernon family.