call," she finally said. "I want to know all about how they live."

Many things combined to make this trip to Washington most pleasurable to
the soldier. He was weary with six weeks of most intense application to
a confused and vexatious situation, and besides he had not been East for
several years, and his pocket was filled with urgent invitations to
dinner from fellow-officers and co-workers in science, courtesies which
he now had opportunity to accept; but back of all and above all was the
hope of meeting Elsie Brisbane again. He immediately wrote her a note,
telling her of his order to report at the department, and asking
permission to call upon her at her convenience.

It was a long ride, but he enjoyed every moment of it. He gave himself
up to rest. He went regularly to his meals in the dining-car; he smoked
and dreamed and looked out with impersonal, shadowy interest upon the
flying fields and the whizzing cities. He slept long hours and rose at
will. Such freedom he had known only on the trail; here luxury was
combined with leisure. In Chicago a friend met him and they lunched at a
luxurious club, and afterwards went for a drive. That night he left the
Western metropolis behind and Washington seemed very near.

As the train drew down out of the snows of the hill country into the
sunshine and shelter of the Potomac Valley his heart leaped. This was
home! Here were the little, whitewashed cabins, the red soil, the
angular stone houses--verandaed and shuttered--of his native town. It
was pleasant to meet the darkies swarming, chirping like crickets,
around the train. They shadowed forth a warmer clime, a less insistent
civilization than that of the West, and he was glad of them. They
brought up in his mind a thousand memories of his boy-life in an old
Maryland village not far from the great city, which still retained its
supremacy in his mind. He loved Washington; to him it was the centre of
national life.

The great generals, the great political leaders were there, and the
greatest ethnologic bureau in all the world was there, and when the
gleaming monument came into view over the wooded hills he had only one
regret--he was sorrowful when he thought of Jennie far away in the bleak
valley of the Elk.

It was characteristic of him that he took a cab to the Smithsonian
Society rather than to the Army and Navy Club, and was made at home at
once in the plain but comfortable "rooms of the Bug Sharps." He had just