e in Congress from Arizona.

A block from here just above Q Street on what is now dignified by the
name of 32nd, but will always remain to old Georgetonians, Valley
Street, lived a very interesting character, still remembered by some
people in Georgetown as "The crazy man of Valley Street."

Among other shabby houses, one which was quite different in appearance
and stood a little back from the street, with a tree in its tiny patch
of a yard, was where he lived. It looked as if it had a story--and it
had. It was told me not long ago by an old friend. I call him a friend,
for whenever I went to the institution where he was a doorkeeper, I went
back in memory to the years when he was our postman. In those days your
postman was your friend. You thought over what your Christmas gift to
him would be as much as a member of your family. Not like it is
nowadays, when he drops your letters through a slit in the door. You
don't know his name, you don't know what he looks like, you don't even
know whether he is white or colored.

This is the story of "the crazy man of Valley Street." During the Civil
War, Captain Chandler was in command of a United States vessel cruising
in the Chesapeake Bay searching ships carrying contraband. He was
accused of making a traitorous remark and dismissed from the service.
His family was living at the Union Hotel, but they left and went to New
York to live. He took his savings and built for himself the little house
on Valley Street. Its interior was made to resemble exactly the cabin of
a ship.

My friend told me that his first encounter with the old gentleman was
one Monday morning about nine-thirty when, having been changed to this
new route, he stopped to open the gate to deliver a letter. It was
locked. He knocked. At last a window was thrown up and the old man's
head emerged. He said the captain looked very much like the pictures of
General Robert E. Lee.

Seeing it was the postman with a letter, he said he would open the gate,
so he pulled a rope--and presto! open it flew. He said he never opened
it until ten o'clock in the morning and wanted to know if his mail could
be delivered after that, which the carrier obligingly offered to do, by
changing his route somewhat.

After that, for years, Mr. Postman was a friend to the old man, though
he never really entered the house. Each month a check for twenty dollars
would come from a nephew in Chicago, which the postman would take to Mr.
Berry