the midst of gardens of flowers.  And now the numberless squares and triangles and grass-plots of the city are green as Dante’s newly-broken emeralds, are a miracle of spotless deutzia and golden laburnum, honeysuckle and jasmine:  half the houses are covered with ivies and grapevines; the Smithsonian grounds surround their dark and castellated group of buildings in a wilderness of bloom; and the rose has come—­such roses as Sappho and Hafiz sung; deep-red roses that burn in the sun, roses that are almost black, so purple is their crimson, roses that are stainless white, long-stemmed, in generous clusters, making the air about them an intoxication in itself—­roses fit to crown Anacreon.  Twice a week during all this sweet season the Marine Band has been blowing out its music in the President’s Grounds and in the Capitol Park late in the warm afternoon, and every one promenades in gala attire beneath the trees and over the shady slopes till the tunes die with the twilight, and many a long-delaying love-affair culminates as the stars come out and the perfumed wind casts down great shadows from the swinging branches overhead, while indulgent duennas gossip on, oblivious of dew; and at midnight the mocking-birds begin to bubble and warble a wild sweet melody everywhere throughout the dark and listening city.  For one brief month, you see, it is politics and power set down in Paradise—­let only the envious say as strangely out of place as the serpent there.  And finally the festivities of this almost ideal spring season, where the world of Fashion and the world of Nature meet at their best, come to an end with Decoration Day—­the last day ere the spring brightens into the blaze of summer—­a day that robs death of its terrors, and seems to carry one back to that primeval period when the old death-defying Egyptians made their festivals with flowers, as we stand in that desolation of the dead on the heights of Arlington, and see the billows of graves stretching away to the horizon, wave after wave, crested with the line of white headstones, and every mound heaped with flowers that have been scattered to the tune of singing children’s voices, while below the peaceful river floats out broadly; and far across its stream, over all the turfy terraces and above the plumy treetops that hide the arched and columned bases of its snowy splendor, the dome of the country’s Capitol rises—­a shining guardian of the slumbers of the dead.

A DAY’S SPORT IN EAST FLORIDA.

  Through these green tents, by eldest Nature dressed,
  He roamed, content alike with man and beast. 
  Where darkness found him, he lay glad at night: 
  There the red morning touched him with its light.

R.W.  EMERSON