pain that you are forced at last to the commonplace belief that these remarkable mountings of the Public Buildings are neither masts nor booms, but simply derricks,--mechanical contrivances for the lifting of very heavy weights. It is some consolation, however, to be told that the weakness of these derricks has never been proved by the endeavor to elevate by means of them the moral character of the inhabitants of Washington. Content yourself, after a reasonable delay for natural wonderment, to leave the strange scene. This shipping-like aspect of the incomplete Departments is only a nice architectural tribute to the fact that the population of Washington is a floating population. This you will not be long in finding out. The oldest inhabitants are here to-day and gone tomorrow, as punctually, if not as poetically, as the Arabs of Mr. Longfellow. A few remain,--parasitic growths, clinging tenaciously to the old haunts. Like tartar on the teeth, they are proof against the hardest rubs of the tooth-brush of Fortune. As with the people, so with the houses. Though they retain their positions, seldom abandoning the ground on which they were originally built, they change almost hourly their appearance and their uses,--insomuch that the very solids of the city seem fluid, and even the stables are mutable,--the horse-house of last week being an office for the sale of patents, or periodicals, or lottery-tickets, this week, with every probability of becoming an oyster-cellar, a billiard-saloon, a cigar-store, a barber's shop, a bar-room, or a faro-bank, next week. And here is another astonishment. You will observe that the palatial museums for the temporary preservation of fossil or fungous penmen join walls, virtually, with habitations whose architecture would reflect no credit on the most curious hamlet in tide-water Virginia. To your amazement, you learn that all these houses, thousands in number, are boarding-houses. Of course, where everybody is a stranger, nobody keeps house. It would be pardonable to suppose, that, out of so many boarding-houses, some would be in reality what they are in name. Nothing can be farther from the fact. These houses contain apartments more or less cheerless and badly furnished, according to the price (always exorbitant, however small it may be) demanded for them, and are devoted exclusively to the storage of empty bottles and demijohns, to large boxes of vegetable- and flower-seeds, to great piles of books, speeches, and documents not yet directed to people who will never read them, and to an abominable odor of boiling cabbages. This odor steals in from a number of pitch-dark tunnels and shafts, misnamed passages and staircases, in which there are more books, documents, and speeches, other boxes of seeds, and a still stronger odor of cabbages. The piles of books are traps set here for the benefit of the setters of broken legs and the patchers of skinless shins, and the noisome odors are