Have you ever seen a country Congressman enter the hotel breakfast-room in Washington with his letters?--and sit at his table and let on to read them?--and wrinkle his brows and frown statesman-like?--keeping a furtive watch-out over his glasses all the while to see if he is being observed and admired?--those same old letters which he fetches in every morning? Have you seen it? Have you seen him show off? It is _the_ sight of the national capital. Except one; a pathetic one. That is the ex-Congressman: the poor fellow whose life has been ruined by a two-year taste of glory and of fictitious consequence; who has been superseded, and ought to take his heartbreak home and hide it, but cannot tear himself away from the scene of his lost little grandeur; and so he lingers, and still lingers, year after year, unconsidered, sometimes snubbed, ashamed of his fallen estate, and valiantly trying to look otherwise; dreary and depressed, but counterfeiting breeziness and gaiety, hailing with chummy familiarity, which is not always welcomed, the more-fortunates who are still in place and were once his mates. Have you seen him? He clings piteously to the one little shred that is left of his departed distinction--the “privilege of the floor”; and works it hard and gets what he can out of it. That is the saddest figure I know of. Yes, we do so love our little distinctions! And then we loftily scoff at a Prince for enjoying his larger ones; forgetting that if we only had his chance--ah! “Senator” is not a legitimate title. A Senator has no more right to be addressed by it than have you or I; but, in the several state capitals and in Washington, there are five thousand Senators who take very kindly to that fiction, and who purr gratefully when you call them by it--which you may do quite unrebuked. Then those same Senators smile at the self-constructed majors and generals and judges of the South! Indeed, we do love our distinctions, get them how we may. And we work them for all they are worth. In prayer we call ourselves “worms of the dust,” but it is only on a sort of tacit understanding that the remark shall not be taken at par._ We_--worms of the dust! Oh, no, we are not that. Except in fact; and we do not deal much in fact when we are contemplating ourselves.