r's Field. Old books and newspapers, chary on such personal
questions, contain occasional references as to some sculptor's
suicide, or to the straits of this or that French officer, a claimant
about Congress; and we know that Major L'Enfant, who conceived the
plan of the place, sought refuge with a pitying friend and died here
penniless. The long war of twenty years in Europe brought to America
thousands in search of safety and rest, and to these the magnetism of
the word "capital" was often the song of the siren wiling them to the
poor-house. By the time Europe had wearied of the sword, the fatality
attending high living, large slave-tilled estates, the love of
official society, and the defective education of the young men of
tide-water Virginia and Maryland, produced a new class of native-born
errants and broken profligates at Washington, and many a life whose
memories began with a coach-and-four and a park of deer ended them
between the coverlets of a poor-house bed. The old times were, after
all, very hollow times! We are fond of reading about the hospitality
of the Madisonian age, but could so many have accepted it if all were
prosperous?

In our time, work being the fate and the redemption of us all, the
District Almshouse contains few government employes. Now and then, as
Mr. Hodgson told us, some clerk, spent with sickness or exhausted by
evil indulgences, takes the inevitable road across the vacant plains
and eats his pauper ration in silence or in resignation; but the age
is better, not, perhaps, because the heart of man is changed, but in
that society is organized upon truer principles of honor, of
manfulness, and of labor. The class of well-bred young men who are
ashamed to admit that they must earn their living, and who affect the
company of gamesters and chicken-fighters, has some remnants left
among us, but they find no aliment in the public sentiment, and hear
no response in the public tone. Duelling is over; visiting one's
relatives as a profession is done; thrift is no more a reproach, and
even the reputation of being a miser is rather complimentary to a man.
The worst chapters of humanity in America are those narrating the
indigence of the old agricultural families on the streams of the
Chesapeake; the quarterly sale of a slave to supply the demands of a
false understanding of generosity; the inhuman revelling of one's
friends upon the last possessions of his family, holding it to be a
jest to precip