Even the old Capital prison is transformed into a handsome and fashionable block of private dwellings. The improvements at the West End are more striking. Solid blocks of city houses are rising in every direction, taking the place of the little, old, isolated house of the past, with its stiff porch, high steps, and open basement doorway. Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut avenues are already lined with splendid mansions, the permanent winter homes of Senators and other high official and military officers. The French, Spanish, English and other foreign governments have bought on and near these avenues for the purpose of building on them handsome houses for their separate legations. The grounds of the Executive Mansion are being enlarged, extending to the Potomac with a carriage drive encircling, running along the shore of the river, extending through the Agricultural Smithsonian and Botanical garden grounds, thus fulfilling the original intent of connecting the White House with the Capitol by a splendid drive. The same transformation is going on in the Capitol grounds. Blocks of old houses have been torn down and demolished, to make room for a park fit to encircle the Capitol, which can never be complete till it takes in all the rolling slopes which lie between it and the Potomac. No scaffolding and pulleys now deface the snowy surfaces of the Capitol. Unimpeded the dome soars into mid-air, till the goddess of liberty on its top seems caught into the embrace of the clouds. The beautiful Treasury building is completed, and a block further on, the click of ceaseless hammers and the rising buttresses of solid stone tell of the new war and navy departments which are swiftly growing beside the historic walls of the old. Even the Washington monument has been taken into hand by General Babcock, to whom personally the Capital owes so much, and by a fresh appeal to the States he hopes to re-arouse their patriotism and insure its grand completion. Flowers blossom on the ramparts of the old forts, so alert with warlike life ten years ago. The army roads, so deeply grooved then, are grass-grown now. The long shed-hospitals have vanished, and stately dwellings stand on their already forgotten sites. The “boys” who languished in their wards, the boys who marched these streets, who guarded this city, how many of them lie on yonder hill-top under the oaks of Arlington, and amid the roses of the Soldier’s Home. Peace, prosperity and luxury have taken the place of war, of knightly days and of heroic men. The mills of time grind slowly. What a tiny stroke in its cycles is a single century. One hundred years! The year nineteen hundred! Then if the father of his country can look down from any star upon the city of his love he will behold in the new Washington that which even he did not foresee in his earthly life—one of the most magnificent cities of the whole earth.