It is claimed, that, in addition to the victims who pay egregious rents for boarding-house beds in order that they may have a place to store their documents and demi-johns, there are other permanent occupants of these houses.  As, for example, Irish chambermaids, who subtract a few moments from the morning half-hour given to drinking the remnants of your whiskey, and devote them to cleaning up your room.  Also a very strange being, peculiar to Washington boarding-houses, who is never visible at any time, and is only heard stumbling up-stairs about four o’clock in the morning.  Also beldames of incalculable antiquity,—­a regular allowance of one to each boarding-house,—­who flit noiselessly and unceasingly about the passages and up and down the stairways, admonishing you of their presence by a ghostly sniffle, which always frightens you, and prevents you from running into them and knocking them down.  For these people, it is believed, a table is set in the houses where the boarders proper flatter their acquaintances that they sleep.  It must be so, for the entire male population is constantly eating in the oyster-cellars.  Indeed, if ocular evidence may be relied on, the best energies of the metropolis are given to the incessant consumption of “half a dozen raw,” or “four fried and a glass of ale.”  The bar-rooms and eating-houses are always full or in the act of becoming full.  By a fatality so unerring that it has ceased to be wonderful, it happens that you can never enter a Washington restaurant and find it partially empty, without being instantly followed by a dozen or two of bipeds as hungry and thirsty as yourself, who crowd up to the bar and destroy half the comfort you derive from your lunch or your toddy.

But, although, everybody is forever eating oysters and drinking ale in myriads of subterranean holes and corners, nobody fails to eat at other places more surprising and original than any you have yet seen.  In all other cities, people eat at home or at a hotel or an eating-house; in Washington they eat at bank.  But they do not eat money,—­at least, not in the form of bullion, or specie, or notes.  These Washington banks, unlike those of London, Paris, and New York, are open mainly at night and all night long, are situated invariably in the second story, guarded as jealously as any seraglio, and admit nobody but strangers,—­that is to say, everybody in Washington.  This is singular.  Still more singular is the fact, that the best food, served in the most exquisite manner, and (with sometimes a slight variation) the choicest wines and cigars, may be had at these banks free of cost, except to those who choose voluntarily to remunerate the banker by purchasing a commodity as costly and almost as worthless as the articles sold at ladies’ fairs,—­upon which principle, indeed, the Washington banks are conducted.  The commodity alluded to is in the form of small discs of ivory, called “chips” or “cheeks” or “shad” or “skad,” and the price varies from twenty-five cents to a hundred dollars per “skad.”