You are assailed by a long rank of hackmen who shake their whips in your face as you step out upon the sidewalk; you enter what they regard as a “carriage,” in the capital, and you wonder why they do not take it out of service and put it in the museum:  we have few enough antiquities, and it is little to our credit that we make scarcely any effort to preserve the few we have.  You reach your hotel, presently—­and here let us draw the curtain of charity—­because of course you have gone to the wrong one.  You being a stranger, how could you do otherwise?  There are a hundred and eighteen bad hotels, and only one good one.  The most renowned and popular hotel of them all is perhaps the worst one known to history.

It is winter, and night.  When you arrived, it was snowing.  When you reached the hotel, it was sleeting.  When you went to bed, it was raining.  During the night it froze hard, and the wind blew some chimneys down.  When you got up in the morning, it was foggy.  When you finished your breakfast at ten o’clock and went out, the sunshine was brilliant, the weather balmy and delicious, and the mud and slush deep and all-pervading.  You will like the climate when you get used to it.

You naturally wish to view the city; so you take an umbrella, an overcoat, and a fan, and go forth.  The prominent features you soon locate and get familiar with; first you glimpse the ornamental upper works of a long, snowy palace projecting above a grove of trees, and a tall, graceful white dome with a statue on it surmounting the palace and pleasantly contrasting with the background of blue sky.  That building is the capitol; gossips will tell you that by the original estimates it was to cost $12,000,000, and that the government did come within $21,200,000 of building it for that sum.

You stand at the back of the capitol to treat yourself to a view, and it is a very noble one.  You understand, the capitol stands upon the verge of a high piece of table land, a fine commanding position, and its front looks out over this noble situation for a city—­but it don’t see it, for the reason that when the capitol extension was decided upon, the property owners at once advanced their prices to such inhuman figures that the people went down and built the city in the muddy low marsh behind the temple of liberty; so now the lordly front of the building, with, its imposing colonades, its, projecting, graceful wings, its, picturesque groups of statuary, and its long terraced ranges of steps, flowing down in white marble waves to the ground, merely looks out upon a sorrowful little desert of cheap boarding houses.