On the pier decrepit I do loiter yet, With my crafty crab-lines and my homespun net, Till the silver fishes in pools of twilight swam, And stars played round my bait in the coves of calm. Sweet were the chinquapins growing by thy brink, Sweet the cool spring-water in the gourd to drink, Beautiful the lilies when the tide declined, As if night receding had left some stars behind. But when the peach tints vanished from the plain, Or struggled no longer the shad against the seine, Every reed in thy march into music stirred, And to gold it blossomed in a singing bird. Eden of water-fowl! clinging to thy dells Ages of mollusks have yielded their shells, While, like the exquisite spirits they shed, Ride the white swans in the surface o'erhead. Silent the otter, stealing by thy moon, Through the fluttered heron, hears the cry of the loon; Motionless the setter in thy dawnlight gray Shows the happy hidden cove where the wild duck play. Homely are thy boatmen, venturing no more In their dusky pungies than to Baltimore, Happy when the freshet from northern mountains sweeps, And strews the bay with lumber like wrecks upon the deeps. Not for thy homesteads of a former space, Not for thy folk of supposititious race; Something I love thee, river, for thy rest, More for my childhood buried in thy breast. From the mightier empire of the solid land, A pilgrim infrequent I seek thy fertile strand, And with a calm affection would wish my grave to be Where falls the Chester to the bay, the bay unto the sea. OLD WASHINGTON ALMSHOUSE. A stranger in Washington, looking down the wide outer avenue named "Massachusetts," which goes bowling from knoll to knoll and disappears in the unknown hills of the east, has no notion that it leads anywhere, and gives up the conundrum. On the contrary, it points straight to the Washington Asylum, better known as the District Poor-House, an institution to become hereafter conspicuous to every tourist who shall prefer the Baltimore and Potomac to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad; for the new line crosses the Eastern Branch by a pile-bridge nearly in the rear of the poor-house, and let us hope that when the whistle, like "the pibroch's music, thrills To the heart of those lone hills," the dreary banks and bluffs of the Eastern Branch will show more frequent signs of habitation and visitation. To visit the poor-house one must have a "permit" from the mayor, physician, or a poor commissioner. Provided with this, he will follow out Pennsylvania Avenue over Capitol Hill, until nearly at the brink of the Anacostia or Eastern Branch, when by the oblique avenue called "Georgia" he will pass to his right the Congressional burying-ground, and arriving at the powder magazine in front, draw up at the almshouse gate, a mile and a quarter from the palace of Congress.