of which you will
always find moored under their lee, safe from the monsoon that prevails
on the open sea of the Avenue. Inwardly, they are labyrinths, through
whose gloomy mazes it is impossible to thread your way without the
assistance of an Ariadne's clue in the shape of an Irishman panting
under a trunk. So obscure and involved are the hotel-interiors, that it
would be madness for a stranger to venture in search of his room without
the guidance of some one far more familiar with the devious course of
the narrow clearings through the forest of apartments than the landlord
himself. Now and then a reckless and adventurous proprietor undertakes
to make a day's journey alone through his establishment. He is never
heard of afterwards,--or, if found, is discovered in a remote angle or
loft, in a state of insensibility from bewilderment and starvation.
If it were not for an occasional negro, who, instigated by charitable
motives or love of money, slouches about from room to room with an empty
coal-scuttle as an excuse for his intrusions, a gentleman stopping at a
Washington hotel would be doomed to certain death. In fact, the lives of
all the guests hang upon a thread, or rather, a wire; for, if the bell
should fail to answer, there would be no earthly chance of getting into
daylight again. It is but reasonable to suppose that the wires to many
rooms have been broken in times past, and it is well known in Washington
that these rooms are now tenanted by skeletons of hapless travellers
whose relatives and friends never doubted that they had been kidnapped
or had gone down in the Arctic.

The differential calculus by which all Washington is computed obtains at
the hotels as elsewhere, with this peculiarity,--that the differences
are infinitely great, instead of infinitely small. While the fronts are
very fine, showy, and youthful as the Lecompton Constitution, the rears
are coarse, common, and old as the Missouri Compromise. The furniture in
the rooms that look upon Pennsylvania Avenue is as fresh as the dogma
of Squatter Sovereignty; that in all other rooms dates back to the
Ordinance of '87. Some of the apartments exhibit a glaring splendor; the
rest show beds, bureaus, and washstands which hard and long usage has
polished to a sort of newness. Specimens of ancient pottery found on
these washstands are now in the British Museum, and are reckoned among
the finest of Layard's collections at Nineveh.

The dining rooms are adm