The differential calculus by which all Washington is computed obtains at the hotels as elsewhere, with this peculiarity,—­that the differences are infinitely great, instead of infinitely small.  While the fronts are very fine, showy, and youthful as the Lecompton Constitution, the rears are coarse, common, and old as the Missouri Compromise.  The furniture in the rooms that look upon Pennsylvania Avenue is as fresh as the dogma of Squatter Sovereignty; that in all other rooms dates back to the Ordinance of ’87.  Some of the apartments exhibit a glaring splendor; the rest show beds, bureaus, and washstands which hard and long usage has polished to a sort of newness.  Specimens of ancient pottery found on these washstands are now in the British Museum, and are reckoned among the finest of Layard’s collections at Nineveh.

The dining rooms are admirable examples of magnificent distance.  The room is long, the tables are long, the kitchen is a long way off, and the waiters a long time going and coming.  The meals are long,—­so long that there is literally no end to them; they are eternal.  It is customary to mark certain points in the endless route of appetite with mile-stones named breakfast, dinner, and supper; but these points have no more positive existence than the imaginary lines and angles of the geometrician.  Breakfast runs entirely through dinner into supper, and dinner ends with coffee, the beginning of breakfast.  Estimating the duration of dinner by the speed of an ordinary railroad-train, it is twenty miles from soup to fish, and fifty from turkey to nuts.  But distance, however magnificent, does not lend enchantment to a meal.  The wonder is that the knives and forks are not made to correspond in length with the repasts,—­in which case the latter would be pitchforks, and the former John-Brown pikes.

The people of Washington are as various, mixed, dissimilar, and contrasted as the edifices they inhabit.  Within the like area, which is by no means a small one, the same number of dignitaries can be found nowhere else on the face of the globe,—­nor so many characters of doubtful reputation.  If the beggars of Dublin, the cripples of Constantinople, and the lepers of Damascus should assemble in Baden-Baden during a Congress of Kings, then Baden-Baden would resemble Washington.  Presidents, Senators, Honorables, Judges, Generals, Commodores, Governors, and the Ex’s of all these, congregate here as thick as pick-pockets at a horse-race or women at a wedding in church.  Add Ambassadors, Plenipotentiaries, Lords, Counts, Barons, Chevaliers, the great and small fry of the Legations, Captains, Lieutenants, Claim-Agents, Negroes, Perpetual-Motion-Men, Fire-Eaters, Irishmen, Plug-Uglies, Hoosiers, Gamblers, Californians, Mexicans, Japanese, Indians, and Organ-Grinders, together with females to match all varieties of males, and you have vague notion of the people of Washington.