Capitol Hill, dreary, desolate and dirty, stretched away into an uninhabited desert, high above the mud of the West End. Arid hill, and sodden plain showed alike the horrid trail of war. Forts bristled above every hill-top. Soldiers were entrenched at every gate-way. Shed hospitals covered acres on acres in every suburb. Churches, art-halls and private mansions were filled with the wounded and dying of the American armies. The endless roll of the army wagon seemed never still. The rattle of the anguish-laden ambulance, the piercing cries of the sufferers whom it carried, made morning, noon and night too dreadful to be borne. The streets were filled with marching troops, with new regiments, their hearts strong and eager, their virgin banners all untarnished as they marched up Pennsylvania avenue, playing “The girl I left behind me,” as if they had come to holiday glory—to easy victory. But the streets were filled no less with soldiers foot-sore, sun-burned, and weary, their clothes begrimed, their banners torn, their hearts sick with hope deferred, ready to die with the anguish of long defeat. Every moment had its drum-beat, every hour was alive with the tramp of troops going, coming. How many an American “boy,” marching to its defence, beholding for the first time the great dome of the Capitol rising before his eyes, comprehended in one deep gaze, as he never had in his whole life before, _all_ that that Capitol meant to him, and to every free man. Never, till the Capital had cost the life of the beautiful and brave of our land, did it become to the heart of the American citizen of the nineteenth century the object of personal love that it was to George Washington. To that hour the intense loyalty to country, the pride in the National Capital which amounts to a passion in the European, in the American had been diffused, weakened and broken. In ten thousand instances State allegiance had taken the place of love of country. Washington was nothing but a place in which Congress could meet and politicians carry on their games at high stakes for power and place. New York was the Capital to the New Yorker, Boston to the New Englander, New Orleans to the Southerner, Chicago to the man of the West. There was no one central rallying point of patriots to the universal nation. The unfinished Washington monument stood the monument of the nation’s neglect and shame. What Westminster Abbey and Hall were to the Englishman, what Notre Dame and the Tuileries were to the Frenchman, the unfinished and desecrated Capitol had never been to the average American. Anarchy threatened it. In an hour the heart of the nation was centered in the Capital. The nation was ready to march to its defence. Every public building, every warehouse was full of troops. Washington city was no longer only a name to the mother waiting and praying in the distant hamlet; _her boy_ was camped on the floor of the Rotunda. No