bevy of more
beautiful women than officiated at one senatorial afternoon tea I
visited; so beautiful were they as to make me entirely forget what
seemed to my untutored European taste the absurdity of their wearing
low-necked evening gowns while their guests sported hat and jacket and
fur. The whole tone of Washington society from the President downward
is one of the greatest hospitality and geniality towards strangers.
The city is beautifully laid out, and its plan may be described as
that of a wheel laid on a gridiron, the rectangular arrangement of the
streets having superimposed on it a system of radiating avenues, lined
with trees and named for the different States of the Union. The city
is governed and kept admirably in order by a board of commissioners
appointed by the President. The sobriquet of "City of Magnificent
Distances," applied to Washington when its framework seemed
unnecessarily large for its growth, is still deserved, perhaps, for
the width of its streets and the spaciousness of its parks and
squares. The floating white dome of the Capitol dominates the entire
city, and almost every street-vista ends in an imposing public
building, a mass of luxuriant greenery, or at the least a memorial
statue. The little wooden houses of the coloured squatters that used
to alternate freely with the statelier mansions of officialdom are now
rapidly disappearing; and some, perhaps, will regret the obliteration
of the element of picturesqueness suggested in the quaint contrast.
The absence of the wealth-suggesting but artistically somewhat sordid
accompaniments of a busy industrialism also contributes to
Washington's position as one of the most singularly handsome cities on
the globe. Among the other striking features of the American capital
is the Washington Memorial, a huge obelisk raising its metal-tipped
apex to a height of five hundred and fifty-five feet. There are those
who consider this a meaningless pile of masonry; but the writer
sympathises rather with the critics who find it, in its massive and
heaven-reaching simplicity, a fit counterpart to the Capitol and one
of the noblest monuments ever raised to mortal man. When gleaming in
the westering sun, like a slender, tapering, sky-pointing finger of
gold, no finer index can be imagined to direct the gazer to the record
of a glorious history. Near the monument is the White House, a
building which, in its modest yet adequate dimensions, embodies the
democratic i