Washington itself merely multiplies the impression of Willard's. Everything is feverish and transitory. The fine houses are rented by senators, by representatives, by foreign ministers, by army and navy officers, by families from other cities. They are taken for a season. Those who occupy them have no permanent interest in the city. The rule is almost universal. The Capitol, the White House, the departments, the public buildings are all full of men who came yesterday and are going to-morrow. Washington is a huge perch. All this tumult of twittering is from birds upon the wing, who have lighted for a moment only. Even the noisiest crows, the most solemn owls, are but for a day, or for two years, or four years, or for six years. There is a certain permanent population of the military and naval bureaus, over whose heads the storms of fashion and politics roar and break like tempests that toss the surface of the sea far above the placid monsters and coral insects of the deep. And there are a few memorial office-holders--quiet men, who have grown old in certain ruts in which they can run with a facility that is absolutely essential. They feel that they have become part of the government. The very oldest senators and representatives excite in their breasts a kind of compassionate sympathy as mere boys and tyros. And like heirs of old royal lines long since superseded, who cherish a secret conviction that modern times are a mere delusion and progress an absurd infatuation, and who are sure that some day the world will discover what a huge mistake it made in not continuing to be governed by the extinct line, and so return to its allegiance, the faithful plodders in the official ruts do still believe that the party, whatever it was, which appointed them is the Heaven-appointed ruler of the country, and that when the froth of the present moment is blown away, the clear, deep, sound good old times will be again discerned. The droll old Jacobites! They drink to the king over the water. They might as well drink to the king with his head off! RECEPTION TO THE JAPANESE AMBASSADORS AT THE WHITE HOUSE