upon the way a beautiful view of the Capitol, which is a fine
building of the Corinthian order, placed upon a noble and
commanding eminence. Arrived at the hotel; I saw no more of the
place that night; being very tired, and glad to get to bed.
Breakfast over next morning, I walk about the streets for an hour
or two, and, coming home, throw up the window in the front and
back, and look out. Here is Washington, fresh in my mind and under
my eye.
Take the worst parts of the City Road and Pentonville, or the
straggling outskirts of Paris, where the houses are smallest,
preserving all their oddities, but especially the small shops and
dwellings, occupied in Pentonville (but not in Washington) by
furniture-brokers, keepers of poor eating-houses, and fanciers of
birds. Burn the whole down; build it up again in wood and plaster;
widen it a little; throw in part of St. John’s Wood; put green
blinds outside all the private houses, with a red curtain and a
white one in every window; plough up all the roads; plant a great
deal of coarse turf in every place where it ought NOT to be; erect
three handsome buildings in stone and marble, anywhere, but the
more entirely out of everybody’s way the better; call one the Post
Office; one the Patent Office, and one the Treasury; make it
scorching hot in the morning, and freezing cold in the afternoon,
with an occasional tornado of wind and dust; leave a brick-field
without the bricks, in all central places where a street may
naturally be expected: and that’s Washington.
The hotel in which we live, is a long row of small houses fronting
on the street, and opening at the back upon a common yard, in which
hangs a great triangle. Whenever a servant is wanted, somebody
beats on this triangle from one stroke up to seven, according to
the number of the house in which his presence is required; and as
all the servants are always being wanted, and none of them ever
come, this enlivening engine is in full performance the whole day
through. Clothes are drying in the same yard; female slaves, with
cotton handkerchiefs twisted round their heads are running to and
fro on the hotel business; black waiters cross and recross with
dishes in their hands; two great dogs are playing upon a mound of
loose bricks in the centre of the little square; a pig is turning
up his stomach to the sun, and grunting ‘that’s comfortable!’; and
neither the men, nor the women, nor the dogs, nor the pig, nor any
created creature, takes the smallest notice of the triangle, which
is tingling madly all the time.
I walk to the front window, and look across the road upon a long,
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straggling row of houses, one story high, terminating, nearly
opposite, but a little to the left, in a melancholy piece of waste
ground with frowzy grass, which looks like a small piece of country
that has taken to drinking, and has quite lost itself. Standing
anyhow and all wrong, upon this open space, like something meteoric
that has fallen down from the moon, is an odd, lop-sided, one-eyed
kind of wooden building, that looks like a church, with a flagstaff
as long as itself sticking out of a steeple something larger
than a tea-chest. Under the window is a small stand of coaches,
whose slave-drivers are sunning themselves on the steps of our
door, and talking idly together. The three most obtrusive houses
near at hand are the three meanest. On one – a shop, which never
has anything in the window, and never has the door open – is
painted in large characters, ‘THE CITY LUNCH.’ At another, which
looks like a backway to somewhere else, but is an independent
building in itself, oysters are procurable in every style. At the
third, which is a very, very little tailor’s shop, pants are fixed
to order; or in other words, pantaloons are made to measure. And
that is our street in Washington.
It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances, but it