pitol, or some huge slander was rising up like a miasmatic
exhalation from the Potomac, threatening to settle no one knew exactly
where. Every other person was an aspirant for a place, or, if he had
one, for a better place, or more pay; almost every other one had some
claim or interest or remedy to urge; even the women were all advocates
for the advancement of some person, and they violently espoused or
denounced this or that measure as it would affect some relative,
acquaintance or friend.

Love, travel, even death itself, waited on the chances of the dies daily
thrown in the two Houses, and the committee rooms there. If the measure
went through, love could afford to ripen into marriage, and longing for
foreign travel would have fruition; and it must have been only eternal
hope springing in the breast that kept alive numerous old claimants who
for years and years had besieged the doors of Congress, and who looked as
if they needed not so much an appropriation of money as six feet of
ground. And those who stood so long waiting for success to bring them
death were usually those who had a just claim.

Representing states and talking of national and even international
affairs, as familiarly as neighbors at home talk of poor crops and the
extravagance of their ministers, was likely at first to impose upon
Philip as to the importance of the people gathered here.

There was a little newspaper editor from Phil's native town, the
assistant on a Peddletonian weekly, who made his little annual joke about
the "first egg laid on our table," and who was the menial of every
tradesman in the village and under bonds to him for frequent "puffs,"
except the undertaker, about whose employment he was recklessly
facetious. In Washington he was an important man, correspondent, and
clerk of two house committees, a "worker" in politics, and a confident
critic of every woman and every man in Washington. He would be a consul
no doubt by and by, at some foreign port, of the language of which he was
ignorant--though if ignorance of language were a qualification he might
have been a consul at home. His easy familiarity with great men was
beautiful to see, and when Philip learned what a tremendous underground
influence this little ignoramus had, he no longer wondered at the queer
appointments and the queerer legislation.

Philip was not long in discovering that people in Washington did not
differ much from other people; they had the same me