l to knoll and disappears
in the unknown hills of the east, has no notion that it leads
anywhere, and gives up the conundrum. On the contrary, it points
straight to the Washington Asylum, better known as the District
Poor-House, an institution to become hereafter conspicuous to every
tourist who shall prefer the Baltimore and Potomac to the Baltimore
and Ohio Railroad; for the new line crosses the Eastern Branch by a
pile-bridge nearly in the rear of the poor-house, and let us hope that
when the whistle, like

"the pibroch's music, thrills
To the heart of those lone hills,"

the dreary banks and bluffs of the Eastern Branch will show more
frequent signs of habitation and visitation.

To visit the poor-house one must have a "permit" from the mayor,
physician, or a poor commissioner. Provided with this, he will follow
out Pennsylvania Avenue over Capitol Hill, until nearly at the brink
of the Anacostia or Eastern Branch, when by the oblique avenue called
"Georgia" he will pass to his right the Congressional burying-ground,
and arriving at the powder magazine in front, draw up at the almshouse
gate, a mile and a quarter from the palace of Congress.

It is a smart brick building, four stories high, with green trimmings,
standing on the last promontory of some grassy commons beloved of
geese and billygoats. The short, black cedars, which appear to be a
species of vegetable crape, give a stubby look of grief to the region
round the poor-house, and, thickest at the Congressional Cemetery,
screen from the paupers the view of the city. Across the plains, once
made populous by army hospitals, few objects move except funeral
processions, creeping toward the graveyard or receding at a merry
gait, and occasional pensioners, out on leave, coming home dutifully
to their bed of charity. The report of some sportsman's gun, where he
is rowing in the marshes of the gray river, sometimes raises echoes in
the high hills and ravines of the other shore, where, many years ago,
the rifles of Graves and Cilley were heard by every partisan in the
land. Now the tall forts, raised in the war, are silent and deserted;
the few villas and farm-houses look from their background of pine upon
the smart edifice on the city shore, and its circle of hospitals
nearer the water, and its small-pox hospital a little removed, and
upon the dead-house and the Potter's Field at the river brink. We all
know the melancholy landscape of a poor-house