out the showers and blow blasts from their shells.  In the room of the Committee on Naval Affairs on both sides as you enter rise grayly the vestibules of vast temples, typifying, perhaps, the sea as the gateway of all nations:  above them, much foreshortened, Neptune and Amphitrite, AEolus, Oceanus, Nereus and Thetis, accompany a new sea-goddess, America, with scores of nymphs interspersed—­all of them riding on sea-horses and simpering sadly; while in the great panels around the sides of the room other nymphs, painted at full length in lively colors, are bearing aloft various symbols of the sea—­this one a sextant, that a chart, another a compass, a fourth a bannerol, sufficiently prosaic in idea, though not ungraceful in fact, as witness the floating damsel who carries a barometer lightly as a mermaid carries her glass, or the figure with the red-gold hair whose back alone we see as she unrolls her map.  But it is not easy to say why we should recur to mythology for our national ornamentation, or why the ancient Greeks should be called in where our own history needs the canvas, or why these aerial young women should so comfortably usurp the place of the Guerriere and Constitution, the dauntless little boat between the fires on Lake Erie, or the unsurpassed sea-scenes of storm and calm along our own coast.

But there is far more than all this pride of the eyes to detain you within the Capitol:  there is the great arena where our political athletes contend, and where, by daily observation of their faces, daily hearing of their voices, daily notice of their manners, one becomes familiar as if by personal acquaintance with the heroes of the day.  In past times the heroes were such as Webster, Calhoun and Clay.  Now they are others—­men whom this belittling age of the telegraph and the reporter brings so near us that there is at least little chance of their ever looming up in undue proportion through the mists of tradition.  It is Henry Wilson, sitting in the Vice-President’s chair, a notable example of the possibilities in a republic; or it is Sumner, with that gray head which all men honor as a type of political integrity, albeit not untinctured with arrogance; or it is another sort of man that engages your attention, one whom you recognize at once, for certainly there is no one but knows that face—­a face so easy to caricature that there is no insult of the pencil that has not been offered it, but which is not the less expressive of an indomitable will, an untamable spirit, and a mind like a torch, throwing light on everything it approaches.  From the instant that General Butler rises the discussion, however dull before, bristles into excitement, and one could hardly wish for an hour of racier enjoyment than is afforded by the debate when he desires to gain a point over able but envious opponents, who never attack him single-handed, and to meet whom, their shafts flying on every side, he brings up his subtlety of argument, his readiness,