It is unnecessary to resort to imagination to make a vivid picture of the sacking of Washington. By the glare of the burning Capitol the red-coats marched up Pennsylvania Avenue to the President’s house. The Palace, as the Federalists called it, was not palatial. The portico had not been built; what was to be the garden was a field of rocks and tree stumps; the interior of the house was crude, and the East Room, since associated with great historical events, had, since the time of Mrs. Adams, been given over to the uses of the laundry. A second fiction connected with the British raid is that they found a great dinner spread on the President’s table and in much glee and derision sat down to devour it. That tale, like the fable of the mock session at the Capitol, was given to a London paper by a merry midshipman. At midnight a violent thunder-storm checked the four conflagrations. The next day the British renewed the devastation, adding to the flames the Departments of State and War, and private buildings. But nature, as if protesting against the outrage, came to the rescue with a cyclone that drove the enemy to seek shelter. Panic seized the combatants. On the Washington side, General Ross, perceiving Americans on the Virginia shore, set fire to the great bridge spanning the Potomac. On the Virginia side, Americans, believing the British were about to cross, simultaneously applied the torch. While the two sheets of flame rushed together, the British army left the ruined capital. Sentiment in England was divided over the destruction of Washington. “Willingly,” said the London _Statesman_, “would we throw a veil of oblivion over the transactions of our buccaneers at Washington. The Cossacks spared Paris, but we spared not the capital of America.” Other British authorities justified the ruin as a reprisal for the burning and destruction of York, the capital of Upper Canada, though that unwarranted act was the work of soldiers acting without authority, and had been generally condemned in America and publicly disavowed by General Dearborn, who commanded the expedition. [Illustration: THE “OCTAGON HOUSE” USED BY PRESIDENT AND MRS. MADISON DURING THE REBUILDING OF THE WHITE HOUSE IN 1814.]