was run out, the Marine Band burst into Rouget de l’Isle’s splendid Hymn, and the envoys, filing between massed rows of bluejackets whose rifles formed a lane of burnished steel, set foot on the soil of the United States, not as strangers, but as allies and friends. Each step in the route of the commissioners through Washington was a lesson in American history, and it was this that gave the route its great dignity and significance. It was not the cheering throngs that lined it, or the thousands of flags that fluttered from the buildings on either side, but the silent statues and the dumb reminders of those who had gone before, who had created this nation and had laid down their lives that this nation might live, and who had come back this day to charge the route with their unseen presence. The Navy Yard, where the commissioners landed, was burned, with the rest of Washington, by the British in 1814, yet now, barely a century later, its foundries were roaring night and day in the manufacture of guns to aid Britain. Swinging from Seventh Street into Pennsylvania Avenue, there rose in the path of the visitors the splendid dome of the Capitol, and beneath that dome the representatives of eight-and-forty States were enacting into law the measures which would send to the aid of France millions of American soldiers and billions of American dollars. At the foot of Capitol Hill the envoys passed the Naval Monument, “In memory of the officers, seamen, and marines who fell in defense of the Union and Liberty of their country.” And now Pennsylvania Avenue stretched, broad and straight and white, before them. At the corner of Tenth Street they found Benjamin Franklin waiting to greet them, clad in the dress he wore when sent by the infant republic to solicit the sympathy and aid of France, and he might have said to them, “We owe our independence to the men and money which your country gave us.” From his granite pedestal at the corner of Thirteenth Street, Casimir Pulaski, the Polish soldier who fell before Savannah, debonair in his busby with its slanting feather and his swinging dolman, saluted the Frenchmen as they passed. At the end of the Avenue, opposite the imposing portico of the Treasury, Sherman sat on his bronze charger, just as he must have sat, half a century ago, when down this same avenue swept in the Last Review the war-worn hosts of the Grand Army, their tattered battle-flags flaunting above the slanting lines of steel, while the delirious crowds which packed the sidewalks chanted the marching-song of Sherman’s men:-- “So we made a thoroughfare for Freedom and her train, Sixty miles in latitude, three hundred to the main; Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain, While we were marching through Georgia.”