WASHINGTON is the paradise of paradoxes, a city of magnificent distances, but of still more magnificent discrepancies. Anything may be affirmed of it, everything denied. What it seems to be it is not; and although it is getting to be what it never was, it must always remain what it now is. It might be called a city, if it were not alternately populous and uninhabited; and it would be a wide-spread village, if it were not a collection of hospitals for decayed or callow politicians. It is the hybernating-place of fashion, of intelligence, of vice, - a resort without the attractions of waters either mineral or salt, where there is no bathing and no springs, but drinking in abundance and gambling in any quantity. Defenceless, as regards walls, redoubts, moats, or other fortifications, it is nevertheless the Sevastopol of the Republic, against which the allied army of Contractors and ClaimAgents incessantly lay siege. It is a great, little, splendid, mean, extravagant, poverty-stricken barrack for soldiers of fortune and votaries of folly.

Scattered helter-skelter over an immense surface, cut up into scalene triangles, the oddity of its plan makes Washington a succession of surprises which never fail to vex and astonish the stranger, be he ever so highly endowed

as to the phrenological bump of locality. Depending upon the hap-hazard start the ignoramus may chance to make, any particular house or street is either nearer at hand or farther off than the ordinary human mind finds it agreeable to believe. The first duty of the new-comer is to teach his nether extremities to avoid instinctively the hypothenuse of the streettriangulation, and the last lesson the resident fails to learn is which of the shortcuts from point to point is the least lengthy. Beyond a doubt, the corners of the streets were constructed upon a cold and brutal calculation of the greatest possible amount of oral sin which disappointed haste and irritated anxiety are capable of committing; nor is any relief to the tendency to profanity thus engendered afforded by the inexcusable nomenclature of the streets and avenues, -a nomenclature in which the resources of the alphabet, the arithmetic, the names of all the States of the Union, and the Presidents as well, are exhausted with the most unsystematic profligacy. A man not gifted with supernatural acuteness, in striving to get from Brown's Hotel to the General Post-Office, turns a corner and suddenly finds himself nowhere, simply because he is everywhere, being at the instant upon three separate streets

and two distinct avenues. And, as a further consequence of the scalene arrangement of things, it happens that the stranger in Washington, however civic his birth and education may have been, is always unconsciously performing those military evolutions styled marching to the right or left oblique,— acquiring thereby, it is said, that obliquity of the moral vision which sooner or later afflicts every human being who inhabits this strange, lop-sided city-village.

So queer, indeed, is Washington City in every aspect, that one newly impressed by its incongruities is compelled to regard Swift's description of Lilliputia and Sydney Smith's account of Australia as poor attempts at fun. For, leaving out of view the pigmies of the former place, whose like we know is never found in Congress, what is there in that Australian bird with the voice of a jackass to excite the feeblest interest in the mind of a man who has listened to the debates on Kansas? or what marvel is an amphibion with the bill of a duck to him who has gazed aghast at the intricate anatomy of the bill of English? It is true that the ignorant Antipodes, with a total disregard of all theories of projectiles, throw their boomerangs behind their backs in order to kill an animal that stands or runs before their faces, or skim them along the ground when they would destroy an object flying overhead. And these feats seem curious. But an accomplished" Constitutional Adviser" can perform feats far more surprising with a few lumps of coal or a number of ships-knees, which are but boomerangs of a larger growth. Another has invented the deadliest of political missiles, (in their recoil,) shaped like mules and dismantled forts, while a third has demolished the Treasury with a simple miscalculation. Still more astonishing are the performances of an eminent functionary who encourages polygamy by intimidation, purchases redress for national insult by intercepting his armies and fleets with an apology in the mouth of a Commissioner, and elevates the Republic in the eyes of man

kind by conquering at Ostend even less than he has lost at the Executive Mansion.

In truth, the list of Washington anomalies is so extensive and so various, that no writer with a proper regard for his own reputation or his readers' credulity would dare enumerate them one by one. Without material injury to the common understanding, a few may be mentioned; but respect for public opinion would urge that the enormous whole be summed up in the comparatively safe and respectful assertion, that the one only absolutely certain thing in Washington is the absence of everything that is at all permanent. The following are some of the more obnoxious astonishments of the place.

Traversing a rocky prairie infested with hacks, you arrive late in the afternoon at a curbed boundary, too fatigued in body and too suffocated with dust to resent the insult to your common-sense implied in the announcement that you have merely crossed what is called an Avenue. Recovered from your fatigue, you ascend the steps of a marble palace, and enter but to find it garrisoned by shabby regiments armed with quills and steel pens. The cells they inhabit are gloomy as dungeons, but furnished like parlors. Their business is to keep everybody's accounts but their own. They are of all ages, but of a uniformly dejected aspect. Do not underrate their value. Mr. Bulwer has said, that, in the hands of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword. Suffer yourself to be astonished at their numbers, but permit yourself to withdraw from their vicinity without questioning too closely their present utility or future destination. No personal affront to the public or the nineteenth century is intended by the superfluity of their numbers or the inadequacy of their capacities. Their rapid increase is attributable not to any incestuous breeding in-and-in among themselves, but to a violent seduction of the President and the Heads of Department by importunate Congressmen; and you may rest assured that this

criminal multiplication fills nobody with half so much righteous indignation and virtuous sorrow as the clerks themselves.

Emerging from the palace of quilldrivers, a new surprise awaits you. The palace is surmounted by what appear to be gigantic masts and booms, economically, but strongly rigged, and without any sails. In the distance, you see other palaces rigged in the same manner. The effect of this spectacle is painful in the extreme. Standing dry-shod as the Israelites were while crossing the Red Sea, you nevertheless seem to be in the midst of a small fleet of unaccountable sloops of the Saurian period. You question whether these are not the fabulous "Ships of State" so often mentioned in the elegant oratory of your country. You observe that these ships are anchored in an ocean of pavement, and your no longer trustworthy eyes search vainly for their helms. The nearest approach to a rudder is a chimney or an unfinished pillar; the closest resemblance to a pilot is a hodcarrying workman clambering up a gangway. Dismissing the nautical hypothesis, your next effort to relieve your perplexity results in the conjecture that the prodigious masts and booms may be nothing more than curious gibbets, the crosspieces to which, conforming rigidly to the Washington rule of contrariety, are fastened to the bottom instead of the top of the upright. Your theory is, that the destinies of the nation are to be hanged on these monstrous gibbets, and you wonder whether the laws of gravitation will be complaisant enough to turn upside down for the accommodation of the hangman, whoever he may be. It is not without pain that you are forced at last to the commonplace belief that these remarkable mountings of the Public Buildings are neither masts nor booms, but simply derricks, mechanical contrivances for the lifting of very heavy weights. It is some consolation, however, to be told that the weakness of these derricks has never been proved by the endeavor to elevate by means of them the moral character of the inhabitants of Washing

ton. Content yourself, after a reasonable delay for natural wonderment, to leave the strange scene. This shipping-like

aspect of the incomplete Departments is only a nice architectural tribute to the fact that the population of Washington is a floating population. This you will not be long in finding out. The oldest inhabitants are here to-day and gone tomorrow, as punctually, if not as poetically, as the Arabs of Mr. Longfellow. A few remain,- parasitic growths, clinging tenaciously to the old haunts. Like tartar on the teeth, they are proof against the hardest rubs of the tooth-brush of Fortune.

As with the people, so with the houses. Though they retain their positions, seldom abandoning the ground on which they were originally built, they change almost hourly their appearance and their uses, insomuch that the very solids of the city seem fluid, and even the stables are mutable, the horse-house of last week being an office for the sale of patents, or periodicals, or lottery-tickets, this week, with every probability of becoming an oyster-cellar, a billiard-saloon, a cigarstore, a barber's shop, a bar-room, or a faro-bank, next week. And here is another astonishment. You will observe that the palatial museums for the temporary preservation of fossil or fungous penmen join walls, virtually, with habitations whose architecture would reflect no credit on the most curious hamlet in tide-water Virginia. To your amazement, you learn that all these houses, thousands in number, are boarding-hous

es.

Of course, where everybody is a stranger, nobody keeps house. It would be pardonable to suppose, that, out of so many boarding-houses, some would be in reality what they are in name. Nothing can be farther from the fact. These houses contain apartments more or less cheerless and badly furnished, according to the price (always exorbitant, however small it may be) demanded for them, and are devoted exclusively to the storage of empty bottles and demijohns, to large boxes of vegetable- and flower-seeds, to

great piles of books, speeches, and documents not yet directed to people who will never read them, and to an abominable odor of boiling cabbages. This odor steals in from a number of pitch-dark tunnels and shafts, misnamed passages and staircases, in which there are more books, documents, and speeches, other boxes of seeds, and a still stronger odor of cabbages. The piles of books are traps set here for the benefit of the setters of broken legs and the patchers of skinless shins, and the noisome odors are propagated for the advantage of gentlemen who treat diseases of the larynx and lungs.

You may

It would appear, then, that the so-called boarding-houses are, in point of fact, private gift-book stores, or rather, commission-houses for the receiving and forwarding of a profusion of undesirable documents and vegetations. view them also in the light of establishments for the manufacture and distribution of domestic perfumery, payment for which is never exacted at the moment of its involuntary purchase, but is left to be collected by a doctor, who calls upon you during the winter, levies on you with a lancet, and distrains upon your viscera with a compound cathartic pill.

It is claimed, that, in addition to the victims who pay egregious rents for boarding-house beds in order that they may have a place to store their documents and demijohns, there are other permanent occupants of these houses. As, for example, Irish chambermaids, who subtract a few moments from the morning half-hour given to drinking the remnants of your whiskey, and devote them to cleaning up your

Also a very strange being, peculiar to Washington boarding-houses, who is never visible at any time, and is only heard stumbling up-stairs about four o'clock in the morning. Also beldames of incalculable antiquity, a regular allowance of one to each boarding-house, who flit noiselessly and unceasingly about the passages and up and down the stairways, admonishing you of their presence by a ghostly sniffle, which always fright

ens you, and prevents you from running into them and knocking them down. For these people, it is believed, a table is set in the houses where the boarders proper flatter their acquaintances that they sleep. It must be so, for the entire male population is constantly eating in the oystercellars. Indeed, if ocular evidence may be relied on, the best energies of the metropolis are given to the incessant consumption of "half a dozen raw," or "four fried and a glass of ale." The bar-rooms and eating-houses are always full or in the act of becoming full. By a fatality so unerring that it has ceased to be wonderful, it happens that you can never enter a Washington restaurant and find it partially empty, without being instantly followed by a dozen or two of bipeds as hungry and thirsty as yourself, who crowd up to the bar and destroy half the comfort you derive from your lunch or your toddy.

But, although everybody is forever eating oysters and drinking ale in myriads of subterranean holes and corners, nobody fails to eat at other places more surprising and original than any you have yet seen. In all other cities, people eat at home or at a hotel or an eating-house; in Washington they eat at bank. But they do not cat money,- at least, not in the form of bullion, or specie, or notes. These Washington banks, unlike those of London, Paris, and New York, are open mainly at night and all night long, are situated invariably in the second story, guarded as jealously as any seraglio, and admit nobody but strangers,—that is to say, everybody in Washington. This is singular. Still more singular is the fact, that the best food, served in the most exquisite manner, and (with sometimes a slight variation) the choicest wines and cigars, may be had at these banks free of cost, except to those who choose voluntarily to remunerate the banker by purchasing a commodity as costly and almost as worthless as the articles sold at ladies' fairs,-upon which principle, indeed, the Washington banks are conducted. The commodity alluded

to is in the form of small discs of ivory, called "chips" or "checks" or "shad" or "skad," and the price varies from twenty-five cents to a hundred dollars per "skad."

It is expected that every person who opens an account at bank by eating a supper there shall buy a number of "shad," but not with the view of taking them home to show to his wife and children. Yet it is not an uncommon thing for persons of a stingy and ungrateful disposition to spend most of their time in these benevolent institutions without ever spending so much as a dollar for "shad," but eating, drinking, and smoking, and particularly drinking, to the best of their ability. This reprehensible practice is known familiarly in Washington as "bucking ag'inst the sideboard," and is thought by some to be the safest mode of doing business at bank.

The presiding officer is never called President. He is called "Dealer,"perhaps from the circumstance of his dealing in ivory, and is not looked up to and worshipped as the influential man of banking-houses is generally. On the contrary, he is for the most part contemned by his best customers, whose heart's desire and prayer are to break his bank and ruin him utterly.

Seeing the multitude of boarding-houses, oyster-cellars, and ivory-banks, you may suppose there are no hotels in Washington. You are mistaken. There are plenty of hotels, many of them got up on the scale of magnificent distances that prevails everywhere, and somewhat on the maritime plan of the Departments. Outwardly, they look like colossal docks, erected for the benefit of hacks, large fleets of which you will always find moored under their lee, safe from the monsoon that prevails on the open sea of the Avenue. Inwardly, they are labyrinths, through whose gloomy mazes it is impossible to thread your way without the assistance of an Ariadne's clue in the shape of an Irishman panting under a trunk. So obscure and involved are the hotel-interiors, that it would be madness

for a stranger to venture in search of his room without the guidance of some one far more familiar with the devious course of the narrow clearings through the forest of apartments than the landlord himself. Now and then a reckless and adventurous proprietor undertakes to make a day's journey alone through his establishment. He is never heard of afterwards, — or, if found, is discovered in a remote angle or loft, in a state of insensibility from bewilderment and starvation. If it were not for an occasional negro, who, instigated by charitable motives or love of money, slouches about from room to room with an empty coal-scuttle as an excuse for his intrusions, a gentleman stopping at a Washington hotel would be doomed to certain death. In fact, the lives of all the guests hang upon a thread, or rather, a wire; for, if the bell should fail to answer, there would be no earthly chance of getting into daylight again. It is but reasonable to suppose that the wires to many rooms have been broken in times past, and it is well known in Washington that these rooms are now tenanted by skeletons of hapless travellers whose relatives and friends never doubted that they had been kidnapped or had gone down in the Arctic.

The differential calculus by which all Washington is computed obtains at the hotels as elsewhere, with this peculiarity,

that the differences are infinitely great, instead of infinitely small. While the fronts are very fine, showy, and youthful as the Lecompton Constitution, the rears are coarse, common, and old as the Missouri Compromise. The furniture in the rooms that look upon Pennsylvania Avenue is as fresh as the dogma of Squatter Sovereignty; that in all other rooms dates back to the Ordinance of '87. Some of the apartments exhibit a glaring splendor; the rest show beds, bureaus, and washstands which hard and long usage has polished to a sort of newness. Specimens of ancient pottery found on these washstands are now in the British Museum, and are reckoned among the finest of Layard's collections at Nineveh.