well-authenticated ghosts infest it, and some of
them are of a more than ordinarily alarming character.

What particularly inspires this last remark is the fact that the Demon
Cat is said to have made its appearance again, after many years of
absence. This is a truly horrific apparition, and no viewless specter
such as the invisible grimalkin that even now trips people up on the
stairs of the old mansion which President Madison and his wife, Dolly,
occupied, at the corner of Eighteenth Street and New York Avenue, after
the White House was burned by the British. That, indeed, is altogether
another story; but the feline spook of the Capitol possesses attributes
much more remarkable, inasmuch as it has the appearance of an ordinary
pussy when first seen, and presently swells up to the size of an
elephant before the eyes of the terrified observer.

The Demon Cat, in whose regard testimony of the utmost seeming
authenticity was put on record thirty-five years ago, has been missing
since 1862. One of the watchmen on duty in the building shot at it then,
and it disappeared. Since then, until now, nothing more has been heard
of it, though one or two of the older policemen of the Capitol force
still speak of the spectral animal in awed whispers.

Their work, when performed in the night, requires more than ordinary
nerve, inasmuch as the interior of the great structure is literally
alive with echoes and other suggestions of the supernatural. In the
daytime, when the place is full of people and the noises of busy life,
the professional guides make a point of showing persons how a whisper
uttered when standing on a certain marble block is distinctly audible at
another point quite a distance away, though unheard in the space
between.

A good many phenomena of this kind are observable in various parts of
the Capitol, and the extent to which they become augmented in
strangeness during the silence of the night may well be conceived. The
silence of any ordinary house is oppressive sometimes to the least
superstitious individual. There are unaccountable noises, and a weird
and eerie sort of feeling comes over him, distracting him perhaps from
the perusal of his book. He finds himself indulging in a vague sense of
alarm, though he cannot imagine any cause for it.

Such suggestions of the supernatural are magnified a thousand fold in
the Capitol, when the watchman pursues his lonely beat through the great
corridors whose immense spac