When the Commissioners appointed by President Washington took it over as a federal district, they changed its Indian name, Connogochegue, to the Territory of Columbia; and the city which they laid out in it was by universal acclaim called Washington, regardless of the modest protests of the statesman thus honored. Georgetown, which is now a part of Washington, was then a pretty, well-to-do, little Maryland town about a hundred years old, and Alexandria, Virginia, included in the southern end of the District as then bounded, was a shipping port of some consequence. All the rest of the tract was forest and farm land. The President felt a lively personal interest in the whole neighborhood. His estate, Mount Vernon, lay only a short boat-ride down the Potomac; and he had been instrumental in starting a project for the canal now known as the Chesapeake and Ohio, connecting Georgetown with a bit of farming country west of it, and had planned one from Alexandria which should form part of the same system. During his activities on the Maryland side of the river, he made his headquarters in a little stone house in Georgetown which is still standing. It took time and diplomacy to induce some of the local landholders to part with their acres to the Commissioners. There is an old story, good enough to be true, of one David Burns, a canny Scot, who held out so long that President Washington personally undertook his conversion. After pointing out to the farmer what advantages he would reap from having the Government for a neighbor, the great man concluded: “But for this opportunity, Mr. Burns, you might have died a poor tobacco-planter.” “Aye, mon,” snapped Burns, “an’ had ye no married the widder Custis, wi’ all her nagurs, ye’d ha’ been a land surveyor the noo, an’ a mighty poor ane at that!” However, when he learned that, unless he accepted the liberal terms offered him, his land would be condemned and seized at an appraisal probably much lower, Burns met the President in quite another mood, and to the final question, “Well, sir, what have you concluded to do?” astonished every one by his prompt response: “Whate’er your excellency wad ha’ me.” On one of his fields now stands the White House, and an adjacent lot became Lafayette Square. By the sale of property adjoining that which the Government bought, he amassed what for those days was an enormous fortune. It is within our generation that his cottage was torn down for the improvement of the neighborhood from which we enter Potomac Park. Although a poor building in its old age, in its prime it had sheltered many eminent men. Among them was Tom Moore, the Irish poet, who was under its roof when he wrote his diatribe against-- “This fam’d metropolis where Fancy sees Squares in morasses, obelisks in trees; Which second-sighted seers, ev’n now, adorn With shrines unbuilt and heroes yet unborn.”