ined this, he suggested a consulship on the continent, or in London.
But I could not see my way clear to leave America. I had too many
interests now, and I wished to see the unfolding of events here.

CHAPTER XXXVII

We found Washington much as Dickens had described it seven years before.
The avenues were broad. They began in great open spaces and faded into
commons equally unbounded. They seemed to lead nowhere. There were
numerous streets without houses. There were public buildings without a
public. There were thoroughfares that had no markings but ornaments. The
residences had green blinds and red and white curtains at the windows
almost without an exception. Grass grew in the avenues. The distances
were great, separating the new public buildings from easy access.
Brickyards were in the center of the city, from which all the bricks had
been taken, leaving only dust, which was stirred by gusts of wind
filling the air at times to suffocation. Pennsylvania Avenue was
grotesque with its big and little buildings, its small and impoverished
shops set between the more splendid windows of jewelry and fabrics. It
was in such sharp contrast with Chicago. No noise here. No smell.
Instead of lumbering drays, many carriages; instead of bustle, leisure;
instead of commercial haste, languid strolling along Pennsylvania
Avenue. And there at its head stood the unfinished Capitol; and at its
other end the executive mansion now occupied by President Polk, and
soon to be the residence of the hero of the Mexican War, Zachary Taylor;
and soon of Millard Fillmore.

Dorothy and I and Mother Clayton visited the places of interest at once.
We went to the Patent Office and saw the model of the Morse telegraph.
We looked at the Declaration of Independence displayed in a glass case
at the Department of State. We stood before Trumbull's pictures of the
celebrated men of an earlier day. We went to the room of the Spring
Court, saw the judges in their black robes, the thin intellectual Chief
Justice Taney at the center. We went to the slave market, where the
capital of the republic trafficked in human flesh for itself and the
surrounding country. Lottery tickets were openly sold. Negroes thronged
the streets. They were the domestic servants, the laborers, the hackmen.
A raggedness, a poverty, a shiftlessness, characterized external
Washington. Washington was not Chicago.

We found that Douglas had settled himself handsomely with his youn