nders and
higglers--piles of game, crisp vegetables and scarlet berries. And
with this comes the excursion down river, sheet after sheet of the
shining stream opening on woody loveliness remote in azure hazes,
to Mount Vernon among its blossoming magnolias and rosy Judas trees,
where the great tomb stands open with its sarcophagi, and where
Eleanor Custis's harpsichord keeps strange company with the grim key
of the Bastile that has never been moved since Washington hung it on
the nail--where the quaint old rooms and verandahs and conservatories
invite the guests, and the garden with its breast-high hedges of
spicy box invites the lovers. Now the few ancestral mansions embower
themselves in an aristocratic seclusion of trees and vines that shut
them in with their birds and flowers and sunshine, and the Van Ness
Place, where Washington came to lay out the city, adorns all its
ancient and mossy magnificence with fresh drapery of leaves and
flowers. The halls of Congress, too, are still open all day, the drama
growing livelier as the adjournment draws nearer; and at evening the
drives are thronged with fine equipages winding down the Fourteenth
street way, out by the Soldiers' Home, through Harewood, or up by
the Anacostia branch and the wild Maryland hill-roads, where
wide-stretching pictures are revealed between the forest trees, while
sometimes one sees, with its two rivers--one shining like silver, one
red and turbid--the city lying far away, much of its outline veiled
and the color of its baked brick and stone and marble mellowed in the
distance, till through the quivering air and among all its towering
trees it looks like a vision of antique temples in the midst of
gardens of flowers. And now the numberless squares and triangles and
grass-plots of the city are green as Dante's newly-broken emeralds,
are a miracle of spotless deutzia and golden laburnum, honeysuckle and
jasmine: half the houses are covered with ivies and grapevines; the
Smithsonian grounds surround their dark and castellated group of
buildings in a wilderness of bloom; and the rose has come--such roses
as Sappho and Hafiz sung; deep-red roses that burn in the sun, roses
that are almost black, so purple is their crimson, roses that are
stainless white, long-stemmed, in generous clusters, making the air
about them an intoxication in itself--roses fit to crown Anacreon.
Twice a week during all this sweet season the Marine Band has been
blowing out its mus