prehistoric days, but among them is not half an acre whose resentment
you would not raise if you addressed them as "Mr." instead of "Hon."
The first thing a legislature does is to convene in an impressive
legislative attitude, and get itself photographed. Each member
frames his copy and takes it to the woods and hangs it up in the most
aggressively conspicuous place in his house; and if you visit the house
and fail to inquire what that accumulation is, the conversation will be
brought around to it by that aforetime legislator, and he will show you
a figure in it which in the course of years he has almost obliterated
with the smut of his finger-marks, and say with a solemn joy, "It's me!"

Have you ever seen a country Congressman enter the hotel breakfast-room
in Washington with his letters?--and sit at his table and let on to
read them?--and wrinkle his brows and frown statesman-like?--keeping a
furtive watch-out over his glasses all the while to see if he is being
observed and admired?--those same old letters which he fetches in every
morning? Have you seen it? Have you seen him show off? It is THE
sight of the national capital. Except one; a pathetic one. That is the
ex-Congressman: the poor fellow whose life has been ruined by a two-year
taste of glory and of fictitious consequence; who has been superseded,
and ought to take his heartbreak home and hide it, but cannot tear
himself away from the scene of his lost little grandeur; and so he
lingers, and still lingers, year after year, unconsidered, sometimes
snubbed, ashamed of his fallen estate, and valiantly trying to look
otherwise; dreary and depressed, but counterfeiting breeziness and
gaiety, hailing with chummy familiarity, which is not always welcomed,
the more-fortunes who are still in place and were once his mates. Have
you seen him? He clings piteously to the one little shred that is left
of his departed distinction--the "privilege of the floor"; and works it
hard and gets what he can out of it. That is the saddest figure I know
of.

Yes, we do so love our little distinctions! And then we loftily scoff
at a Prince for enjoying his larger ones; forgetting that if we only had
his chance--ah! "Senator" is not a legitimate title. A Senator has no
more right to be addressed by it than have you or I; but, in the several
state capitals and in Washington, there are five thousand Senators who
take very kindly to that fiction, and who purr gratefully when you call
t