While I sat in the chair I heard a man, who seemed to be in about the third chair from me, saying that a certain bill numbered so-and-so had been referred to a certain committee and would undoubtedly by reported favorably. If so, it would in its regular order come up for discussion and reach a vote so-and-so. I was charmed with the man's knowledge of the condition of affairs in both houses and the exact status of all threatened legislation, because I always have to stop and think a good while before I can tell whether a bill originates on the floor of the house or in the rotunda. I could not see this man, but I judged that he was a senator or sergeant-at-arms. He talked for some time about the condition of national affairs, and finally some one said something about evolution. I was perfectly wrapped up in what he was saying and remember distinctly how he referred to Herbert Spencer's definition of evolution as a change from indefinite, coherent heterogeneity through continuous differentiations and integrations. When I arose from my chair and looked over that way I saw that the gentleman who had been talking on the condition of congressional legislation was a colored hotel porter of Washington, who was getting shaved in the third chair, and the man who was discussing the merits of evolution was the colored man who was shaving him. Here in Washington the colored man has the air of one who is holding up one corner of the great national structure. Whether he is opening your soft boiled eggs for you in the morning, or putting bay rum on your nose, or checking your umbrella or brushing you with a wilted whisk broom, his thoughts are mostly upon national affairs. He is naturally an imitator wherever he goes, and this old resident of Washington has watched and studied the air and language of eminent statesmen so carefully that when he goes forth in the morning with his whitewashing portfolio on his arm he walks unconsciously like Senator Evarts or John James Ingalls. I saw a colored man taking a perpendicular lunch at the depot yesterday, and evidently the veteran Georgia senator is his model, for he cut his custard pie into large rectangular hunks and pushed it back behind his glottis with a caseknife, after which he drew in a saucerful of tea, with a loud and violent ways-and-means committee report which reminded me of the noise made by an unwearied cyclone trying to suck a cistern dry. I think that the colored man exaggerated the imitation somewhat, but he was evidently trying to assume the table manners of Senator Brown of Georgia.