we know not where, nor over what
struggles, and shadows, and sorrows.

I pity the army mule, though he never asked me for sympathy. Who ever
loved a mule? You can love a lion, and make him lick your hand: some
people love parrots, and owls; and I once knew a person who could catch
black snakes and carry them lovingly in his bosom; but I never knew a
beloved mule. Yet this war has been fought and won by hybrids. They have
pulled us out of ruts and fed us, and starved for us. The mule is the
great quartermaster. See him and his brethren yonder in
corral,--miserable veterans of no particular race, slab-sided, and
capable of holding ink between their ribs. They mounch, and mounch, and
wear the same stolid eye which you have seen under the driver's lash,
and in the vaulting moment of victory. No stunning receptions greet
them, no cheers and banquets when Muley comes marching home; over at
_Giesboro_ they come in crippled, die by the musket without a murmur,
and are immediately boiled down and forgotten.

I was once beaten by a rival correspondent upon a prominent battle, by
riding a mule with my despatches. He walked into a mud-puddle just half
way between the field and the post-office, and stopped there till
morning.

Here we are, at Washington. I have been in most of the cities of Europe:
some of them have dirty suburbs, but the first impression of the Capitol
City is dreary in the extreme; a number of the lost tribes have
established booths contiguous to the terminus, wherein the filthiest
people in the world eat the filthiest dishes; a man's sense of
cleanliness vanishes when he enters the District of Columbia. I have
been astonished to remark how greatness loses its stature here. Mr.
Charles Sumner is a handsome man on Broadway or Beacon Street, but
eating dinner at Thompson's, his shoulders seem to narrow and his fine
face to grow commonplace.

Above the squalid wideness of ungraded streets and the waste of shanties
propped upon poles above abysses of vacant lots, where two drunken
soldiers are pummelling each other, towers the marvellous dome with its
airy genius firmly planted above, like the ruins of Palmyra above
contemporary meanness. Moving up the streets, in dust and mud-puddle,
you see shabbily ambitious churches, with wooden towers; hotels, the
curbs whereof are speckled with human blemishes, sustaining like
hip-shotten caryatides the sandstone-wooden columns. Within there is a
pandemonium of legs in the