in trouble inserted this advertisement:

It is terrible to my feelings, but I am compelled to give notice
that I intend petitioning the next General Assembly for an act of
Insolvency in my favor.

A few months later he advertised thus:

Having taken the house in this place lately occupied by Mr. James
Clagett, between the College and the River, a pleasant and healthy
situation, I will take four or five boys as boarders at the usual
rates, paid quarterly.

So let us hope he got "on his feet" again.

John Stevens, merchant, advertised himself thusly:

My weights are good, my measures just,
My friends I am too poor to trust. July 15, 1780.

Apparently they had plenty of newspapers. In 1789 _The Times and
Potowmack Packet_; in 1790 _The Weekly Ledger_ (an appropriate name for
this town of counting houses); in 1796 _The Sentinel of Liberty_, a more
high-flown name; in 1801, _The Museum_, and a great many more as time
went on.

The first bank was the old Bank of Columbia, organized in 1793. Then,
there was the Union Bank. I have seen a great many of its checks,
smaller than the ones of today and very simply printed.

Business notes in those days were written on any scrap of paper,
apparently. Many that I have seen had torn edges, but always the writing
was regular and even, if sometimes hard to read. Very often it looked
like copperplate engraving. The English pound was used as late as 1796.

Plenty of schools there seem to have been. One famous man (he was
William Wirt, the author of _The British Spy_ and Attorney-General of
the United States for twelve years under James Monroe and John Quincy
Adams) was sent to George Town for his early training, and has written
thus: "In 1779 I was sent to George Town, eight miles from Bladensburg
to school, a classical academy kept by Mr. Rogers. I was placed at
boarding with the family of Mr. Schoofield, a member of the Society of
Friends.... I passed one winter in George Town and remember seeing a
long line of wagons cross the river on the ice, attached to troops going
South."

Thomas Kirk, an Irish gentleman, kept a school first on Washington
(30th) Street, later at High (Wisconsin Avenue) and Cherry Streets.
Reverend Addison Belt, of Princeton, had a school on Gay (N) Street,
between Congress (31st) and Washington (30th) Streets. Christian Hines
says: "In 1798 I went to school to a man named Richmond who kept school
in a small brick