. The
negroes interested and fascinated him: they were so grimly ugly of
face, and yet apparently so good natured and light hearted.

On the street again he saw the same types of men. He wondered if they
were not his colleagues. As for them, they probably took him for a
Boston or New York man, with his full brown beard and clear complexion.

The negroes attracted his eyes constantly. They drifted along the
street apparently aimlessly, many of them. Their faces were mostly
smiling, but in a meaningless way, as if it were a habit. He soon found
that they were swift to struggle for a chance to work. They asked to
carry his valise, to black his boots; the newsboys ran by his side, in
their eagerness to sell.

As he went along, he noticed the very large number of "Rooms to Let,"
and the equally large number of signs of "Meals, Fifteen and
Twenty-five Cents." Evidently there would be no trouble in finding a
place to board.

As he entered Radbourn's office, he saw a young lady seated at a desk,
manipulating a typewriter. She had the ends of a forked rubber tube
hung in her ears, and did not see Bradley. He observed that the tube
connected with a sewing-machine-like table and a swiftly revolving
little cylinder, which he recognized as a phonograph. At the window sat
Radbourn, talking in a measured, monotonous voice into the mouthpiece
of a large flexible tube, which connected with another phonograph. His
back was toward Bradley, and he stood for some time looking at the
curious scene and listening to Radbourn's talk.

"Congress brings to Washington a fulness of life which no one can
understand who has not spent the summer here," Radbourn went on, in a
slow, measured voice, his lips close to the bell-like opening of the
tube. It had a ludicrous effect upon Bradley--like a person talking to
himself.

"The city may be said to die, when Congress adjourns. Its life is
political, and when its political motor ceases to move the city lies
sprawled out like a dead thing. Its streets are painfully quiet. Its
street cars shuttle to and fro under the burning sun, and its teamsters
loaf about the corners drowsily. The store-keepers keep shop, of
course, but they open lazily of a morning and close early at night. The
whole city yawns and rests and longs for the coming of the autumn and
Congress.

"It is amusing and amazing to see it begin to wake up at the beginning
of the session. Then begins the scramble of the hotels and
boardin