the other sights of the town, throng the doors, leave cards and partake of refreshments.  Of course many strange occurrences are incidental to such occasions; and so the lady whose beauty had been made famous must have thought when unknown crowds flocked to see her, destroying daily a vase or a statuette, a photograph or a book, but always staring with all their eyes, and one day crowning their enormities with a procession of deaf-mutes from an asylum, which filed in and gazed and filed out again, in total silence of course, save now and then a crack of nimble finger-joints.

All the other days in the week the great lady is occupied in returning these visits, hunting for obscure addresses, trailing her rich garments over third-story stairs; and it is no uncommon thing for her to have the names of one or two thousand people in her visiting-book, on whom she is to call, provided she can find them.  Of course the call is brief, the faces are unknown, the conversation is void, and the only satisfaction attained is in checking off that particular name as done with.  Certainly this great lady’s lot is not altogether enviable.  In the daytime she is claimed by calls, in the night-time by balls; at nine in the morning people on business begin to clamor for her husband, at ten, if he is a Congressman, he goes to his committee, at twelve Congress meets to adjourn at five; and if after that some political dinner, at which great things are to be adjusted, does not take him to itself till nearly midnight, constituents, schemers and lobbyists do.  What sort of home-life there can be where the master of the house is out all day and the mistress is out all night, remains a matter of conjecture.

But there are wheels within wheels; and all the wheels are not so thoroughly oiled as to make things run with perfect smoothness; and thus in the progress of this very “calling” sad disturbances arise.  Shall the Senators’ wives make the first call on the Cabinet ministers’ wives?  By no means:  the Cabinet ministers are but creatures of a day, ephemera, who draw their breath by and with the advice and consent of the Senate:  they must respect their creator.  Shall the Senators’ wives call first upon the wives of the justices of the Supreme Court?  There is a doubt:  the Supreme Court is the last resort of the law of the land, a reverend and hoary institution, and its judges, having a life-lease, will be judges still when the Senators shall have passed away; but no, again—­the Senators make the justices.  The Representatives shall make the first call on the Senators’ wives of course; but how about the Speaker’s wife?  She is the third in succession from the presidency, says the new-comer:  she is nothing but a Representative still, says the compelling etiquette.  Finally, through some incomprehensible regulation, whose framer forgot that though democracies may be rude they must not be inhospitable, the wives of the foreign ambassadors, representatives of sovereign states, have to go the