of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword.  Suffer yourself to be astonished at their numbers, but permit yourself to withdraw from their vicinity without questioning too closely their present utility or future destination.  No personal affront to the public or the nineteenth century is intended by the superfluity of their numbers or the inadequacy of their capacities.  Their rapid increase is attributable not to any incestuous breeding in-and-in among themselves, but to a violent seduction of the President and the Heads of Department by importunate Congressmen; and you may rest assured that this criminal multiplication fills nobody with half so much righteous indignation and virtuous sorrow as the clerks themselves.  Emerging from the palace of quill-drivers, a new surprise awaits you.  The palace is surmounted by what appear to be gigantic masts and booms, economically, but strongly rigged, and without any sails.  In the distance, you see other palaces rigged in the same manner.  The effect of this spectacle is painful in the extreme.  Standing dry-shod as the Israelites were while crossing the Red Sea, you nevertheless seem to be in the midst of a small fleet of unaccountable sloops of the Saurian period.  You question whether these are not the fabulous “Ships of State” so often mentioned in the elegant oratory of your country.  You observe that these ships are anchored in an ocean of pavement, and your no longer trustworthy eyes search vainly for their helms.  The nearest approach to a rudder is a chimney or an unfinished pillar; the closest resemblance to a pilot is a hod-carrying workman clambering up a gangway.  Dismissing the nautical hypothesis, your next effort to relieve your perplexity results in the conjecture that the prodigious masts and booms may be nothing more than curious gibbets, the cross-pieces to which, conforming rigidly to the Washington rule of contrariety, are fastened to the bottom instead of the top of the upright.  Your theory is, that the destinies of the nation are to be hanged on these monstrous gibbets, and you wonder whether the laws of gravitation will be complaisant enough to turn upside down for the accommodation of the hangman, whoever he may be.  It is not without pain that you are forced at last to the commonplace belief that these remarkable mountings of the Public Buildings are neither masts nor booms, but simply derricks,—­mechanical contrivances for the lifting of very heavy weights.  It is some consolation, however, to be told that the weakness of these derricks has never been proved by the endeavor to elevate by means of them the moral character of the inhabitants of Washington.  Content yourself, after a reasonable delay for natural wonderment, to leave the strange scene.  This shipping-like aspect of the incomplete Departments is only a nice architectural tribute to the fact that the population of Washington is a floating population.  This you will not be long in finding out.  The oldest inhabitants are here to-day and gone tomorrow, as punctually, if not as poetically, as the Arabs of Mr. Longfellow.  A few remain,—­parasitic growths, clinging tenaciously to the old haunts.  Like tartar on the teeth, they are proof against the hardest rubs of the tooth-brush of Fortune.