sses a person very different from either of these--a tall and
martial figure, a filibustero in every clime, hunted with blood-hounds
in the Spanish sierras when Don Carlos needed him, floating naked
on bladders down the Danube, with despatches in his mouth, when
the Hungarians were sore pressed. Here goes a jolly, happy man, who
contentedly lets title and coronet go by across the sea while he
practices law in the Patent Office. Here on the avenue go up and
down all these people, and countless others with stories as pointed,
whether it be such a story as that of Captain Suter, whose treacherous
servant bartered all the gold of California for a single drink, or of
this black man who to-day is free and yesterday was a slave.

But attractive as this picturesque grouping of avenues and edifices
may be, the attraction does not belong to the outside alone: inside
the great doors of the majestic halls you will find that time has
wings while you pass in review the trophies of all the zones, and
of the meteoric heavens too, preserved in the Smithsonian, or the
archives of the country in the Patent Office. This latter is indeed a
place of enchantment. The Pompeiian hall has something of the air of a
hall dressed for legerdemain, and if you pause to think you will
note a strange wizardry at work there. You linger before a little
printing-press, and as if magical clouds rose and shut out the
work-day world, the skies of Greece are overhead and the Ancient
searching for his lever with which to move the world passes down the
room and lingers with you; for surely he has found the lever, and
surely the world has been moved with it, the boundaries of empires
broken up, kings discrowned, republics ruined. Go farther: a case
of toys: harmless trifles enough, arrests you--cannon a finger long,
batteries the size of a lady's spool-stand, but the reduced models of
death-dealing engines whose power of wholesale slaughter may one day
revolutionize the codes of nations and abolish warfare. In another
case you observe only a lump of coal, a phial of pitch, a flask of
oil; and the necromancer of the place has dipped his rod down into the
central darkness of the earth and drawn up light like the day's. Yet
beyond: an iron stirrup and a slender spur, and the sewing-girl has
but to set her foot there and escape the shapes that dog her. Not far
away, again, we remember the Oriental magician, who as often as
the king cut off his head grew another in it