Here passes a person very different from either of these—­a tall and martial figure, a filibustero in every clime, hunted with blood-hounds in the Spanish sierras when Don Carlos needed him, floating naked on bladders down the Danube, with despatches in his mouth, when the Hungarians were sore pressed.  Here goes a jolly, happy man, who contentedly lets title and coronet go by across the sea while he practices law in the Patent Office.  Here on the avenue go up and down all these people, and countless others with stories as pointed, whether it be such a story as that of Captain Suter, whose treacherous servant bartered all the gold of California for a single drink, or of this black man who to-day is free and yesterday was a slave.

But attractive as this picturesque grouping of avenues and edifices may be, the attraction does not belong to the outside alone:  inside the great doors of the majestic halls you will find that time has wings while you pass in review the trophies of all the zones, and of the meteoric heavens too, preserved in the Smithsonian, or the archives of the country in the Patent Office.  This latter is indeed a place of enchantment.  The Pompeiian hall has something of the air of a hall dressed for legerdemain, and if you pause to think you will note a strange wizardry at work there.  You linger before a little printing-press, and as if magical clouds rose and shut out the work-day world, the skies of Greece are overhead and the Ancient searching for his lever with which to move the world passes down the room and lingers with you; for surely he has found the lever, and surely the world has been moved with it, the boundaries of empires broken up, kings discrowned, republics ruined.  Go farther:  a case of toys:  harmless trifles enough, arrests you—­cannon a finger long, batteries the size of a lady’s spool-stand, but the reduced models of death-dealing engines whose power of wholesale slaughter may one day revolutionize the codes of nations and abolish warfare.  In another case you observe only a lump of coal, a phial of pitch, a flask of oil; and the necromancer of the place has dipped his rod down into the central darkness of the earth and drawn up light like the day’s.  Yet beyond:  an iron stirrup and a slender spur, and the sewing-girl has but to set her foot there and escape the shapes that dog her.  Not far away, again, we remember the Oriental magician, who as often as the king cut off his head grew another in its place, as we see the machinery for a feat almost as wonderful in the exact anatomy of steel springs and leather ligaments made to fit upon the very nerves of volition themselves, till the halt walk and the maimed are made whole.  In this spot is the jar into which the fisherman shut the afrite; in that are the great genii who gather in a harvest; and in still another there lies a tiny thing answering your touch with no louder noise than a buzz and a click, but its whisper can be heard from end to end of the land, and it runs beneath the roar of ocean to carry the voice of one world to another.  In fact, within these crystal cells the intelligence of all our millions is concreted; and it is no wonder that in the face of the marvels here inventors are sometimes seized with a temporary madness, and have to be cared for till the fit passes.