Justice of the Supreme Court, Owen J. Roberts,
bareheaded, with a lady, to whom he said, "They are probably saying,
'Some old geezer named Greeley'!" So I glanced west down O Street and
there, drawn up along the southern sidewalk, was a company of U. S.
Cavalry, red and white guidon of Company F from Fort Myer. Then I
realized that it was the day of days for General Greeley. At last, on
his ninety-first birthday, he was being decorated with the Congressional
Medal of Honor. It had been many a year since his fateful expedition to
the Arctic in search for the North Pole.

Just across the street from here now lives Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and
a little farther on, the old house up on a low terrace is where the
Lancastrian School was opened in November 1811 under Robert Ould. In a
few weeks there were 340 boys and girls under tuition, and in 1812 an
appropriation was asked for an addition to accommodate 250 more
scholars.

[Illustration: CHRIST CHURCH]

The Lancastrian School was sustained by private contributions and
municipal aid for thirty-two years. The name came from Joseph Lancaster,
a Quaker, who started this system in England of coeducational schools,
free to those who could not pay. Lancaster had a school of one thousand
pupils in Southwark, but disagreements arising with some of the
authorities, he emigrated to America in 1818. He died in New York in
1838.

About 1840, Samuel McKenney, whose house adjoined this property on the
south, bought it and gave it to his daughter who had gone to southern
Maryland to live, and so she came back to Georgetown. Her descendants,
the Osbournes, lived there until just a few years ago when the "cult"
for old houses in Georgetown began. When a garden was made there
recently, some of the old foundations of the schoolroom were uncovered.

Almost next door is the Linthicum Institute, which still conducts its
night school for white boys, and above it is the hall where the old
Georgetown Assemblies are still held. Here also Mrs. Shippen has her
Dancing Classes, and here now my grandchildren are learning where I had
my first lessons in the same art. The old hall looks just as it did in
my day.

Then at 3018 is Christ Church Rectory, where I happened to be born; it
was not the rectory then.

Christ Church, as you recall, was founded in 1817 in Thomas Corcoran's
house. The illustration shows the first church building of the three
which have stood on this spot. It was begun May 6