“Take the worst parts of the City Road and Pentonville, or the straggling outskirts of Paris, where the houses are smallest, preserving all their oddities, but especially the small shops and dwellings, occupied in Pentonville (but not in Washington) by furniture-brokers, keepers of poor eating-houses, and fanciers of birds. Burn the whole down; build it up again in wood and plaster; widen it a little; throw in part of St. John’s Wood; put green blinds outside all the private houses, with a red curtain and a white one in every window; plow up all the roads; plant a great deal of coarse turf in every place where it ought _not_ to be; erect three handsome buildings in stone and marble, anywhere, but the more entirely out of everybody’s way the better; call one the Post Office, one the Patent Office, and one the Treasury; make it scorching hot in the morning, and freezing cold in the afternoon, with an occasional tornado of wind and dust; leave a brick-field without the bricks, in all central places where a street may naturally be expected; and that is Washington.” From this sort of place, perhaps even less beautiful, Davy was whirled away on the April morning before mentioned, viewing from his seat on the top of a great coach the roadside scenes between Washington and Baltimore. Upon arriving at the latter city, he put up at Barnum’s Hotel, kept by “Uncle Davy,” whom he gladly hailed as a namesake. He says that no one could find better quarters or a more hospitable city. He was asked to dine with his friend Wilkes and other Baltimore gentlemen, and spent the evening pleasantly in their company. The next morning he was up early, in order to take the steamboat to Philadelphia. At this time only seventeen miles of railroad existed between the two cities, crossing the land in the vicinity of Wilmington and Havre de Grace. It was called the Charlestown and Augusta Railway. The departure from Baltimore seems to have given Davy a sense of lonesomeness. He felt what so many others since have felt――poor human mites among a swarm of busy ants!――that the loneliest place in all the world is a great city. He realized, and tells us so, that the tens of thousands who passed him by in the noisy streets neither knew nor cared who he might be, and that at the best he might expect to be valued at about the price of a coon-skin. This we have already seen to be no more than a York shilling, or a quart of New England rum. “The steamboat,” says Davy, “was the _Carroll of Carrollton_, a fine craft, with the rum old Commodore Chaytor for head man. A good fellow he is――all sorts of a man――bowing and scraping to the ladies, nodding to the gentlemen, cursing the crew, and his right eye broadcast upon the ‘opposition line,’ all at the same time. ‘Let go!’ says the old one, and off we walked in prime style.”