celebrated functions were given at Carusi’s Assembly rooms which could accommodate great numbers. Leaders of fashion and the socially ambitious of Baltimore and Alexandria, wishing to make an impression in introducing a débutante or to repay social obligations, found these rooms suited to their purpose. It was in these rooms that Washington society had its first presentation of the “Barber of Seville,” and “John of Paris” in the winter of 1833.[106] The same year a Washington birthday party was given there, both rooms thrown open, “decorated and illuminated and with a band in each,” and diplomats admitted without an entrance fee.[107] Hither all the ladies of the capital, unfamiliar with the dances, or wishing to learn new ones, found their way to learn from the popular Louis, only the inclemency of the weather and the impossible mire of the streets interfering with his profits.[108] Thus the fashionables of the Thirties managed to create the illusion of living in the great world, chattering in the Senate, bustling into the Supreme Court chamber, dining, dancing, flirting, gossiping, attending the theater to see a Booth or a Kemble, going to the circus to see the animals fed at eight o’clock, “in the presence of the audience,”[109] or riding to the National Course near town to witness the races, or attending an exhibit of the paintings of John G. Chapman on the Avenue.[110] Only on Sundays did the capital become quiet and sedate, for, after a pious morning pilgrimage to church, the ladies carrying a hymn or a prayer book and leaning on the arms of their escorts, they retired to the seclusion of their homes and the streets were deserted or given over to the promenades of the colored folks.[111] In this Washington, where men were feverishly fighting for place and prestige, and women were engaged in a hectic struggle for social leadership, Death lurked always, for a less healthful spot could not easily have been found. Built originally in a swamp reeking with malaria, surrounded with morasses, and with not a few of these in the heart of the town, with sanitation poor and water wretched, the residents were constantly menaced by disease. With the gradual disappearance of the forests immediately surrounding it, the conditions became worse. The death-rate was as high as one in fifty-three, with August claiming the heaviest toll from fevers.[112] Between the fevers of the summers and the influenza of the winters, the residents had to be constantly on guard. Whiskey and quinine were taken with the regularity of bread and meat, and tourists were wont to sit late at their quarters “sipping gently a medicine which the doctors of the capital thought destructive of the influenza germs which were lying in wait for the unwary.”[113] Fevers, pneumonia, influenza, and the cholera made the swampy capital of the Thirties as profitable to the doctors as to the coachmen.