“The rotunda is a grand assembly hall with its polished floors, rich carpets and hangings, antique vases and bric-a-brac, divans and luxurious lounges, as little like a hotel office as the ‘east room’ of the White House is like a railway station. The apartment is seventy-eight feet square and is thirty feet from the floor to the ceiling. The massive doors are of Spanish mahogany, highly polished, encasing heavy plates of bevelled glass, the frames are carved in designs of great beauty. Thirteen marble columns support a balcony that looks over from the second floor, around which is a carved rail, also in Spanish mahogany. “The Moorish and Spanish styles which prevail in the architectural work do not always obtain in the decorations and furnishings--the divans in the rotunda were once in the Tuileries salons, and there is an original portrait in oil of Louis XIV. of France, also a clock of the same period. The paintings are varied in design, as they are in age and history, and every one, every antique and cabinet, has its history. On one wall is a beautiful canvas, the _Return from the Masquerade_, on another, _Wine, Woman, and Song_, these suggest the gay side of life, while some of the old faded examples of the school of long ago carry one back to the old masters. Two dwarfs in bronze that suggest the Black Forest legends guard the entrance to the hall of the grand salon, and near them are two Japanese vases, six feet high, which were exhibited at the Vienna exposition. “Mirrors in antique frames rich in gilded carvings are on the walls, massive doors in bevelled glass lead to parlors, halls, libraries, and writing rooms, electric lights are imbedded in the ceilings and walls, and hang down in chandeliers. This is the rotunda. The business office occupies the smallest corner, as if it was of the smallest importance in a hall so replete with ornament and so devoted to comfort and luxury. The telegraph and ticket offices are also in the rotunda, and everything that pertains to the more prosaic business ideas--but they do not intrude upon the dreamy existence that obtains from the antique surroundings.