To Washington and Major L'Enfant, who in an antique tavern in Georgetown met the heirs and descendants of these pioneers to negotiate the transfer of property to the Government, the strange story was told that one, Francis Pope, in the year 1663, had had a vision wherein he beheld a stately house of parliament on what is now Capitol Hill. In pursuance of this dream he had purchased that eminence and had called it "Rome," and in further keeping with his sense of divination had given to a sluggish yellow stream at the base of the hill the name of "Tiber." Pope, it was asserted, died in the faith that the wooded hill he had christened would some day be crowned with a grand edifice devoted to the deliberations of a mighty empire. Some of the more irreverent settlers, dolefully observing the continued remoteness of Pope's uninhabited "Rome" from any possible capital, derisively substituted, it was claimed, the name Goose Creek for the Tiber and denied the hill the dignity of even a colloquial title.
The Tiber still flows on, but in the obscurity of a modern sewer.
The poet, Tom Moore, who stumbled through the bogs and over the "magnificent
