tart and a shudder,
as a haunted man might do, becoming aware, in sleep, of the approach of
some horrible thing. There he sat, on the logs close to my feet, in a
heavy stertorous slumber, his huge head rocking to and fro, and his
features hideously contorted, as he growled and gibbered to himself in
an unknown tongue, like some dreaming Caliban. I arose and fled away
swiftly from the face of my "brother," and, finding no other available
resting-place, did battle on the outside platform with the keen night
wind.

I am indebted, however, to that honest contraband for a curious sight,
which I should have otherwise missed--the crossing of the Gunpowder
River. There, the train rushes, on a single track, over three-quarters
of a mile of tremulous trestle-work, without an apology for a side-rail,
so that you look straight down into the dark water, over which you seem
wafted with no visible support beneath. The effect is sufficiently
startling, especially seen as I saw it, under a bright, capricious moon.
From Baltimore, the cars were less crowded, and I encountered my dusky
tormentor no more.

If there is much in first impressions, I was not likely to be enchanted
with Washington.

The snow, just then beginning to melt, lay inches deep on the
half-frozen soil; everything looked unnaturally and unutterably dreary
in the bleak leaden dawn-light; and, as I drove down Pennsylvania avenue
(after rejection at the lodgings to which I had been recommended), the
first object that caught my eye was a huge placard:

EMBALMING OF THE DEAD.

These ghastly advertisements are not unfrequent in that part of the
city, and I was informed that the advertisers occasionally do a very
brisk business.

After waiting for two hours in the hall of the Metropolitan, like a
client in some patrician antechamber, they _did_ accord me a tolerable
room on the sublimest story.

I called that same afternoon on Lord Lyons, to whom I brought an
introductory letter. I have to thank the British Legation for much
courteous kindness, and for two very pleasant evenings, on the first of
which I was the guest of the chief, on the second, of his secretaries.
Here will (if I ever leave it behind me) begin and end my agreeable
reminiscences of Washington. I disliked it cordially at first sight; I
was thoroughly bored before I had got through my stay of seventy hours;
I utterly abominate and execrate the city

From turret to foundation-stone,

at thi