So queer, indeed, is Washington City in every aspect, that one newly impressed by its incongruities is compelled to regard Swift’s description of Lilliputia and Sydney Smith’s account of Australia as poor attempts at fun.  For, leaving out of view the pigmies of the former place, whose like we know is never found in Congress, what is there in that Australian bird with the voice of a jackass to excite the feeblest interest in the mind of a man who has listened to the debates on Kansas? or what marvel is an amphibian with the bill of a duck to him who has gazed aghast at the intricate anatomy of the bill of English?  It is true that the ignorant Antipodes, with a total disregard of all theories of projectiles, throw their boomerangs behind their backs in order to kill an animal that stands or runs before their faces, or skim them along the ground when they would destroy an object flying overhead.  And these feats seem curious.  But an accomplished “Constitutional Adviser” can perform feats far more surprising with a few lumps of coal or a number of ships-knees, which are but boomerangs of a larger growth.  Another has invented the deadliest of political missiles, (in their recoil,) shaped like mules and dismantled forts, while a third has demolished the Treasury with a simple miscalculation.  Still more astonishing are the performances of an eminent functionary who encourages polygamy by intimidation, purchases redress for national insult by intercepting his armies and fleets with an apology in the mouth of a Commissioner, and elevates the Republic in the eyes of mankind by conquering at Ostend even less than he has lost at the Executive Mansion.

In truth, the list of Washington anomalies is so extensive and so various, that no writer with a proper regard for his own reputation or his readers’ credulity would dare enumerate them one by one.  Without material injury to the common understanding, a few may be mentioned; but respect for public opinion would urge that the enormous whole be summed up in the comparatively safe and respectful assertion, that the one only absolutely certain thing in Washington is the absence of everything that is at all permanent.  The following are some of the more obnoxious astonishments of the place.

Traversing a rocky prairie inflated with hacks, you arrive late in the afternoon at a curbed boundary, too fatigued in body and too suffocated with dust to resent the insult to your common-sense implied in the announcement that you have merely crossed what is called an Avenue.  Recovered from your fatigue, you ascend the steps of a marble palace, and enter but to find it garrisoned by shabby regiments armed with quills and steel pens.  The cells they inhabit are gloomy as dungeons, but furnished like parlors.  Their business is to keep everybody’s accounts but their own.  They are of all ages, but of a uniformly dejected aspect.  Do not underrate their value.  Mr. Bulwer has said, that, in the hands