whole cruise as a ward-room boy on that
station. While thus employed she had met with two of the gentlemen
present; Capt. Mull and Mr. Wallace. The former was then first
lieutenant of the frigate, and the latter a passed-midshipman; and in
these capacities both had been well known to her. As the name she then
bore was the same as that under which she now "hailed," these officers
were soon made to recollect her, though Jack was no longer the light,
trim-built lad he had then appeared to be. Neither of the gentlemen
named had made the whole cruise in the ship, but each had been
promoted and transferred to another craft, after being Jack's shipmate
rather more than a year. This information greatly facilitated the
affair of the doubloons.

From Charleston the travelers came north by railroad. Harry made
several stops by the way, in order to divert the thoughts of his
beautiful young bride from dwelling too much on the fate of her aunt.
He knew that home would revive all these recollections painfully, and
wished to put off the hour of their return, until time had a little
weakened Rose's regrets. For this reason, he passed a whole week in
Washington, though it was a season of the year that the place is not
in much request. Still, Washington is scarce a town, at any season. It
is much the fashion to deride the American capital, and to treat it as
a place of very humble performance with very sounding pretensions.
Certainly, Washington has very few of the peculiarities of a great
European capital, but few as these are, they are more than belong to
any other place in this country. We now allude to the _distinctive_
characteristics of a capital, and not to a mere concentration of
houses and shops within a given space. In this last respect,
Washington is much behind fifty other American towns, even while it is
the only place in the whole republic which possesses specimens of
architecture, on a scale approaching that of the higher classes of the
edifices of the old world. It is totally deficient in churches, and
theatres, and markets; or those it does possess are, in an
architectural sense, not at all above the level of village or
country-town pretensions, but one or two of its national edifices do
approach the magnificence and grandeur of the old world. The new
Treasury Buildings are unquestionably, on the score of size,
embellishments and finish, _the_ American edifice that comes nearest
to first class architecture on the other