able to conjure up no image of majesty and beauty eclipsing the reality.  For all this and much more is now under way:  streets have been leveled and paved and parked, embankments have been terraced, boulevards have been planted with mile-long rows of lindens, blossoming gardens have been laid out, fountains have been opened, and such dwellings erected with their grass-plots and their water-jets before them, in place of the bare old barracks and shanties, that it is now a city of parks and palaces.  Your carriage can roll for leagues over streets whose roadway is smooth as a floor, past squares rich in the foliage and flower of their season, enchanting pictures of river and height unveiled at every turn, and the squalor once so prominent is seen striking its tents, while only the splendor remains.  There is hardly a street but down its vista some allurement is displayed:  this one reaches far away, through the green of willows and the blue of distance, across the Long Bridge and into the hills of Virginia; that one ends in the Agricultural Department and its delightful grounds; down these the Institution is seen at various angles in various guises; while the great Pennsylvania Avenue gives you at one end the Capitol dome, always a thin and pale blue mist about its whiteness, with the shining colonnades that bear it lifted high over the tossing treetops below, and at the other end the southern facade of the Treasury, rising before you like an antique temple, while noble views open at every intersection of the cross-streets there; and toward nightfall the distant mists of the river-country beyond build up sunsets unrivaled in their gorgeousness.

There are few more interesting thoroughfares in the world than this avenue.  Here ruler and ruled jostle each other; here thunder the liveried equipages of foreign nobles; here saunters the President, and nobody turns to look.  Sooner or later all the famous of the world are tolerably sure to be met upon it:  as we walk there History walks beside us and mighty shadows move before us.  Washington has dashed down that avenue in his yellow chariot that was painted with cupids and drawn by six white horses; Hamilton, Jefferson, La Fayette, Burr, and all the gods of the republic have trodden it before us; dishonoring British squadrons have marched upon it; it has shaken to the tread of our own legions; and great forms begin to loom in the national memory that have just passed from its daily crowds.  Nor does all its interest belong to the past:  those daily crowds themselves are full of perpetual dramas in which the actors are unknown perhaps to fame or fiction, but none the less real and in sad earnest with their play.  Here goes a little withered man in his threadbare coat:  he has a proud and scowling face, but he pauses with a singularly sweet and gentle manner at every group of children, black or white.  He is an old numismatician, a foreigner, and his youth in Europe was given to the gathering of coins and medals till he had a nearly unrivaled