ath just round the bend of the Anacostia there; the conflicts by
tongue and pen that have again and again gone on here till the whole
country swayed; Gamaliel Bailey silencing a mob at his door; the
histories that lie buried under the thirty thousand headboards that
gleam like an army of ghosts among the trees of Arlington; Abraham
Lincoln gasping his life away in that little Tenth street house; his
assassin dashing in darkness across the bridge at our feet, over which
we have just passed, and spurring almost into the shadow of the parapet
where we stand;--all these things, and a hundred more as tempting to the
dreamer, come crowding on the mind at every glance. Yet who stops to
call Washington a romantic city? When the White House, just visible from
those tree-tops, shall have ceased, as it soon must do, to be the home
of the chief magistrate, what future magician shall summon down those
cheerless stairways the ghostly procession of dead Presidents, as our
first literary necromancer marshaled the shades of royal governors
across the threshold of the Province House? We turn from all this to
speak of the practical affairs of to-day which await us in the city,
with a reluctance that delays our feet as we descend.

A phrase applied, we believe, by Dickens, when writing of the avenues
here many years ago, and illustrating his remarkable faculty of telling
the most truth when he exaggerated most, rises so constantly to mind
when one considers what Washington has been, that we are tempted to make
it a kind of text. He described the great houseless thoroughfares as
"beginning nowhere and ending in nothing." That phrase sets old
Washington before the reader as the literal truth could never do.

But the reader must now remember that old Washington is going--that a
new Washington has come. The city is no longer disposed to make
apologies, wait for generosity or beg for patronage. It is disposed--and
has proved its disposition--to take off its seedy coat and go to work in
its own way. Its waiting is now only for enlightened judgment from
others, and its begging is only for justice.

The change of local government in 1871, when Congress gave the District
of Columbia a legislature and a representative, was the particular event
from which may be dated such innovations as make necessary a revision of
the popular opinion. The visitors who come this month, and who have not
been here since the last inauguration, will have to learn the c