On Christmas 1787, George Washington, for the entertainment of his guests, paid 18 shillings for a camel to temporarily live at Mount Vernon during the Christmas season. Twelve years later, on today's date in 1799, he died, narrowly missing stepping out of the eighteenth century, of which he was in so many ways the embodiment, and into the nineteenth, better defined by the likes of Napoleon, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Bismarck, and Lincoln.
 
A camel is again at Mount Vernon: Aladdin, a big hit with one and all. He is shown above, with a Washington lookalike.