In the early annals of this peaceful little city in the undulating oak grove between Monona and Mendota,--surrounded on every hand by far-stretching lakes and marshes, and thus in a measure isolated from her rural neighbors,--the historian finds little of stirring interest; and that little almost always the reflex of the Legislature, which annually until 1882, when the sessions were made biennial, came and went with much bustle and sometimes brawl. The legislative sessions were, in ante-bellum days, the events of the year, and attracted prominent men from all quarters of Wisconsin. The crude hotels were filled each winter with legislators, lobbyists and visiting politicians. The humors of the time were often uncouth. There was a deal of horse-play, hard drinking, and profanity, and occasionally a personal encounter during the heat of discussion: as in 1842, when Charles C.P. Arndt, of Brown, was killed on the floor of the council chamber by his fellow-member, James R. Vineyard, of Grant, an event to which Dickens alluded in his _American Notes_, and which gained for Wisconsin an unenviable notoriety the country over. But an undercurrent of good nature was generally observable, and strong attachments were more frequently noticeable than feuds. [Illustration VIEW OF MADISON ACROSS LAKE MONONA.] Dancing and miscellaneous merry-making were the order of the times, and society at the capital was, from the first, thought to be fashionable. Even when the Legislature was not in session, Madison long remained the social as well as the political centre of Wisconsin, and overland travellers between the outlying settlements on the shores of the Mississippi and Lake Michigan or Green Bay were wont to tarry here upon their way. Several of them have left us, in journals and in letters, pleasing descriptions of their reception by the good-natured inhabitants, and the impressions made on them by the natural attractions of this beauty-spot.