The poor-house is an institution coeval with the capital.  We are told that while crabbed old Davy Burns, the owner of the most valuable part of the site of Washington City, was haggling with General Washington over his proportion of lots, his neglected and intemperate brother, Tommy, was an inmate of the poor-house.

Thus, while the Romulus of the place married his daughter to a Congressman, and was buried in a “mausoleum” on H Street, Remus died without the walls and mingled his ashes, perhaps, with paupers.

The vaunted metropolis of the republican hopes of mankind—­for such was Washington, the fabulous city, advertised and praised in every capital of Western Europe—­drew to its site artists, adventurers, and speculators from all lands.  From Thomas Law, a secretary of Warren Hastings, who wasted the earnings of India on enterprises here, to a Frenchman who died on the guillotine for practising with an infernal machine upon the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, the long train of pilgrims came and saw and despaired, and many of them, perhaps, lie in the Potter’s Field.  Old books and newspapers, chary on such personal questions, contain occasional references as to some sculptor’s suicide, or to the straits of this or that French officer, a claimant about Congress; and we know that Major L’Enfant, who conceived the plan of the place, sought refuge with a pitying friend and died here penniless.  The long war of twenty years in Europe brought to America thousands in search of safety and rest, and to these the magnetism of the word “capital” was often the song of the siren wiling them to the poor-house.  By the time Europe had wearied of the sword, the fatality attending high living, large slave-tilled estates, the love of official society, and the defective education of the young men of tide-water Virginia and Maryland, produced a new class of native-born errants and broken profligates at Washington, and many a life whose memories began with a coach-and-four and a park of deer ended them between the coverlets of a poor-house bed.  The old times were, after all, very hollow times!  We are fond of reading about the hospitality of the Madisonian age, but could so many have accepted it if all were prosperous?

In our time, work being the fate and the redemption of us all, the District Almshouse contains few government employes.  Now and then, as Mr. Hodgson told us, some clerk, spent with sickness or exhausted by evil indulgences, takes the inevitable road across the vacant plains and eats his pauper ration in silence or in resignation; but the age is better, not, perhaps, because the heart of man is changed, but in that society is organized upon truer principles of honor, of manfulness, and of labor.  The class of well-bred young men who are ashamed to admit that they must earn their living, and who affect the company of gamesters and chicken-fighters, has some remnants left among us, but they find no aliment in the public sentiment, and