Having rested from his journey and removed the stains of travel, if he were a person of some importance, and especially a foreigner, he would be speedily deluged with the cards of callers anxious to make his sojourn pleasant. Day by day the hotel registers were eagerly scanned for the names of visiting celebrities, for the Washington of the Thirties loved its lions and lionesses. No possible person was ever neglected, and real personages were fêted, wined, and dined. But not until he set forth to return the calls would he appreciate the Portuguese Minister’s description of the capital as “a city of magnificent distances.” Inquiring at the hotel how to reach the residences of his callers, he would be not a little puzzled at the nonchalant reply that the coachmen “knew where all the prominent people live.” Engaging a coach, he would set forth gayly, in the confident expectation of leaving his card at from thirty to forty houses in the course of the day. A short drive would take him to the end of the macadamized pavement of the Avenue, and thereafter for hours, pitching and plunging, over the ruts and the mud-holes, through miry lanes, and across vacant lots, shaken in body, and sore in spirit, he would find by evening that he had reached six or seven of the forty houses, and was charged by the coachman at a rate “which would keep a chariot and two posters for twice the time in London.”[14] In the course of a week he would find that he had spent as much as thirty dollars for coach hire--by odds, the most expensive feature of his Washington sojourn. An English visitor, startled at the cost of travel, contracted with a coachman for services from five o’clock to daylight for twenty dollars, but after having attended five parties on the first evening, the morose driver repudiated his contract, and it was necessary to add five dollars to retain his services.[15] “I should imagine [Washington] to be the very paradise of hackney coachmen,” wrote one disgusted visitor. “If these men do not get rich it must be owing to some culpable extravagance, for their vehicles are in continual demand from the hour of dinner[16] till five in the morning, and long distances and heavy charges are all in their favor.”[17]