England; as the tiles made in this country do not preserve their colour like the English ones. The ceilings of some of the passages are beautifully decorated; and one of the committee rooms, appropriated to agricultural matters, is remarkably well painted in fresco; all the subjects have allusion to agricultural pursuits. In the centre of the building, round the circular part, under the dome, are some very indifferent pictures, representing subjects connected with the history of America, beginning with the landing of Columbus. Two out of the eight represented incidents in the war of independence; one being the surrender of Lord Cornwallis, who seemed very sorry for himself. The view from the Capitol is fine; the gardens round it are kept in good order, and there being a great deal of maple in the woods, the redness of the leaf gave a brilliant effect to the scene. From the Capitol we went to the Patent Office, in which are contained an endless variety of models. It is immediately opposite the Post Office, and both are splendid buildings of white marble. The Post Office is still unfinished, but it will be of great size. The Patent-Office is an enormous square building. The four sides, which are uniform, have large flights of stairs on the outside, leading to porticos of Corinthian pillars. We entered the building, and went into a large apartment, where we were lost in contemplation of the numerous models, which we admired exceedingly, though the shortness of the time we had to devote to them prevented our examining them as minutely as they seemed to deserve. Papa, indeed, was disposed to be off when we had gone through this room, as we had still much to do, and he professed his belief that we must have seen the whole. I, having my wits more about me, could not conceive how this could well be the case, seeing we had only looked at one out of four sides. There is no one in these places to show them to strangers, so we asked a respectable-looking person if there were any more rooms, when he replied, "Oh, yes! you have only been looking at the _rejected_ models." Whereupon we entered on the second side of the square; but, to confess the truth, the rejected and accepted ones seemed to us much of a piece, and we were not sorry, on arriving at the third side, to find it shut up and apparently empty, so we beat a retreat. We were told at Baltimore that the collection was a very fine one, and doubtless it may be very interesting to a person competent to judge of the details; but the models, besides being shut up in glass-cases, and consequently very inaccessible, were generally on too small a scale to be comprehended by ordinary observers, and in this respect, the collection was of much less interest to us than the exhibition we had lately seen in the unfortunate Crystal Palace at New York, where the models exhibited were of the full size of the machines meant to be used, and consequently almost intelligible to an unprofessional person.