On entering the port of Charleston he got up the box containing his treasures, and was about to open it, when, to my intense delight and amusement, an officer of the ship stayed his hasty hand.  “What’s that for?” exclaimed the wrathful Israelite.  “I guess that box is in the manifest,” was the calm reply, “and you can’t touch it till it goes to the custom-house.”  Jonathan had “done” the Hebrew; and besides the duty, he had the pleasure of paying freight on them also; while, to add to his satisfaction, he enjoyed the sight of all the other passengers taking their five hundred or so unmolested, while compelled to pay duty on every cigar himself.  But we must leave the Jew, the “Isabel”—­ay, Charleston itself.  “Hurry hurry, bubble bubble, toil and trouble!” Washington must be reached before the 4th of March, or we shall not see the Senate and the other House in session.  Steamer and rail; on we dash.  The boiling horse checks his speed; the inconveniences of the journey are all forgotten:  we are at Washington, and the all-absorbing thought is, “Where shall we get a bed?”

My companion[AC] and myself drove about from hotel to boarding-house, from boarding-house to hotel, and from hotel to the Capitol, seeking a resting-place in vain.  Every chink and cranny was crammed; the reading-rooms of the hotels had from one to two dozen stretcher beds in each of them.  ’Twas getting on for midnight; Hope’s taper was flickering faintly, when a police-officer came to the rescue, and recommended us to try a small boarding-house at which he was himself lodging.  There, as an especial favour, we got two beds put into a room where another lodger was already snoring; but fatigue and sleep soon obliterated that fact from our remembrance.  Next morning, while lying in a half doze, I heard something like the upsetting of a jug near my bedside, and then, a sound like mopping up; suspicious of my company, I opened my eyes, and lo! there was the owner of the third bed, deliberately mopping up the contents of the jug he had upset over the carpet, with—­what do you think?  His handkerchief? oh, no—­his coat-tails? oh, no—­a spare towel? oh, no; the savage, with the most placid indifference, was mopping it up with my sponge!  He expressed so much astonishment when I remonstrated, that I supposed the poor man must have been in the habit of using his own sponge for such purposes, and my ire subsided gradually as he wrung out the sponge by an endless succession of vigorous squeezes, accompanying each with a word of apology.  So much for my first night at Washington.

We will pass over breakfast, and away to the Capitol.  There it stands, on a rising knoll, commanding an extensive panoramic view of the town and surrounding country.  The building is on a grand scale, and faced with marble, which, glittering in the sunbeams, gives it a very imposing appearance; but the increasing wants of this increasing Republic have caused two wings to be added, which are now in the course of