nful." And I thought also: "New York may talk, and
Chicago may talk, and Boston may talk, but it is these groups of
provincials who are the real America." They were extraordinarily like
people from the Five Towns--that is to say, extraordinarily like
comfortable average people everywhere.

We were outside again, under one of the enormous porticos of the
Capitol. The guide was receiving his well-earned dollar. The faithful
fellow had kept nicely within the allotted limit of half an hour.

"Now we'll go and see the Congressional Library," said my particular
friend.

But I would not. I had put myself in a position to retort to any
sight-seeing American in Europe that I had seen his Capitol in thirty
minutes, and I was content. I determined to rest on my laurels.
Moreover, I had discovered that conventional sight-seeing is a very
exhausting form of activity. I would visit neither the Library of
Congress, nor the Navy Department, nor the Pension Bureau, nor the
Dead-Letter Museum, nor the Zoological Park, nor the White House, nor
the National Museum, nor the Lincoln Museum, nor the Smithsonian
Institution, nor the Treasury, nor any other of the great spectacles of
Washington. We just resumed the sea-going hack and drove indolently to
and fro in avenues and parks, tasting the general savor of the city's
large pleasantness. And we had not gone far before we got into the
clutches of the police.

"I don't know who you are," said a policeman, as he stopped our
sea-going hack. "I don't know who you are," he repeated, cautiously, as
one accustomed to policing the shahs and grand viziers of the earth,
"but it's my duty to tell you your coachman crossed over on the wrong
side of the lamp-post. It's not allowed, and he knows it as well as I
do."

We admitted by our shamed silence that we had no special "pull" in
Washington; the wise negro said not a word; and we crept away from the
policeman's wrath, and before I knew it we were up against the
Washington Monument--one of those national calamities which ultimately
happen to every country, and of which the supreme example is, of course,
the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens.

[Illustration: ON THE STEPS OF THE PORTICO--THE CAPITOL]

When I drove into the magnificent railway station late that
night--true American rain was descending in sheets--I was carrying away
with me an impression, as it were, of a gigantic plantation of public
edifices in a loose tangle and undergrowth