The Olivia Letters: Being Some History of Washington City for Forty Years as Told by the Letters of a Newspaper CorrespondentBriggs, Emily Edson
History
The Olivia Letters: Being Some History of Washington City for Forty Years as Told by the Letters of a Newspaper Correspondent
Briggs, Emily Edson
United States -- Politics and government -- 1865-1933; Washington (D.C.) -- History
Senator Sharon! “Lo! the conquering hero comes” on the breath of
the wind, at the same time hitched behind a fiery locomotive. He is
already done up in broad-cloth and fine linen, and is probably at
this hour sleeping in his own “special car” as he rushes over the
steel roadway with which dear old Oakes Ames spanned the continent.
What a picture of Oriental magnificence, with his almond-eyed,
dark-haired daughter at his side! What a flutter among the dames of
the grand West End! In his presence a small bore of the Army and
Navy, a “swell” of an upper clerk, or even an obscure Congressman
pales as the stars are wiped out by the effulgence of a full-blown
sun! “But he ain’t handsome!” Shut up, you ill-bred child! Handsome
is that handsome does! Didn’t Senator Sharon spend $40,000 on the
Grant reception, and owns a house so large that people get lost in
it? It takes as long to explore it as it does the Mammoth Cave! “What
does he come here for, mamma?” “Why, to show his heathen Chinee, and
see if his glass shoe will fit any Cinderella at the capital.” “They
pared their heels and they pared their toes,” but the special car
goes back to the Pacific slope empty and tenantless, in one sense,
as it came. The ripple subsides, to rise at each approach of the
“special car,” and so the play goes on.
Senator Booth, of California, is another matrimonial venture worth
looking after, but he has already been toughened by several winter
campaigns in Washington, until it is declared by those that ought
to know that a sigh drawn fresh and pure from the deepest and most
capacious female bosom and applied to the right place will have
no more effect than a Holman liver pad administered for lockjaw,
whilst a glance from the most brilliant eye falls like a sunbeam on
an alligator’s back. Managing mammas have given up whist parties on
his account, because he is far more “whist” than the count. But the
Senator is in a tolerable state of preservation, considering the
number of sieges he has endured, and bids fair to return to the sand
lots of California no worse for the tender wear and tear to which he
has been so cruelly subjected.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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