It is expected that every person who opens an account at bank by eating a supper there shall buy a number of “shad,” but not with the view of taking them home to show to his wife and children.  Yet it is not an uncommon thing for persons of a stingy and ungrateful disposition to spend most of their time in these benevolent institutions without ever spending so much as a dollar for “shad,” but eating, drinking, and smoking, and particularly drinking, to the best of their ability.  This reprehensible practice is known familiarly in Washington as “bucking ag’inst the sideboard,” and is thought by some to be the safest mode of doing business at bank.

The presiding officer is never called President.  He is called “Dealer,”—­perhaps from the circumstance of his dealing in ivory,—­and is not looked up to and worshipped as the influential man of banking-houses is generally.  On. the contrary, he is for the most part condemned by his best customers, whose heart’s desire and prayer are to break his bank and ruin him utterly.

Seeing the multitude of boarding-houses, oyster-cellars, and ivory-banks, you may suppose there are no hotels in Washington.  You are mistaken.  There are plenty of hotels, many of them got up on the scale of magnificent distances that prevails everywhere, and somewhat on the maritime plan of the Departments.  Outwardly, they look like colossal docks, erected for the benefit of hacks, large fleets of which you will always find moored under their lee, safe from the monsoon that prevails on the open sea of the Avenue.  Inwardly, they are labyrinths, through whose gloomy mazes it is impossible to thread your way without the assistance of an Ariadne’s clue in the shape of an Irishman panting under a trunk.  So obscure and involved are the hotel-interiors, that it would be madness for a stranger to venture in search of his room without the guidance of some one far more familiar with the devious course of the narrow clearings through the forest of apartments than the landlord himself.  Now and then a reckless and adventurous proprietor undertakes to make a day’s journey alone through his establishment.  He is never heard of afterwards,—­or, if found, is discovered in a remote angle or loft, in a state of insensibility from bewilderment and starvation.  If it were not for an occasional negro, who, instigated by charitable motives or love of money, slouches about from room to room with an empty coal-scuttle as an excuse for his intrusions, a gentleman stopping at a Washington hotel would be doomed to certain death.  In fact, the lives of all the guests hang upon a thread, or rather, a wire; for, if the bell should fail to answer, there would be no earthly chance of getting into daylight again.  It is but reasonable to suppose that the wires to many rooms have been broken in times past, and it is well known in Washington that these rooms are now tenanted by skeletons of hapless travellers whose relatives and friends never doubted that they had been kidnapped or had gone down in the Arctic.