Most of the tourists do buy, however. They seem to be blindly credulous--these folk who feel their way to Washington. It was not so very many spring-times ago that a rumor worked afloat of a dull Sabbath to the effect that the Washington Monument was about to fall. That rumor slipped around the town with amazing rapidity--Washington is hardly more than a gossipy, rumor-filled village after all. Two or three thousand folk went down to the Mall to be present at the fall. No two of them could agree as to the direction in which the shaft would tumble and they all made a long and cautious line that completely encircled it--at a safe distance. After long hours of waiting they all went home. Yet no one was angry. They all seemed to think it part of the day's program. * * * * * There is another side of Washington not so funny and tourists, even of the most sedate sort, who stop at the large hotels and who ride about in dignified motor-cars, do not see it. It is the side of heart-burnings. For in no other city of the land is the social code more sharply defined--and regulated. There are many cities in the country and we are telling of them in this book, who draw deep breaths upon exclusiveness. But in none of these save Washington do the folk who do obtain flaunt themselves in the faces of those who do not. The fine old houses of Beacon street, in Boston, and of the Battery down at Charleston may draw themselves apart, but they do it silently and unostentatiously. In the very nature of things in Washington much modesty is quite out of the question. [Illustration: The stately dome of our lovely Capitol] For here at our Federal capital we have a strange mixture of real democracy and false aristocracy as well as real--if there be any such thing as real aristocracy. The fact that almost every person in the town works, more or less directly, for Uncle Sam makes for the democracy. And that self-same fact seems to fairly establish the aristocracy--you can frankly call much of it snobbishness--of the place. To understand the whys and wherefores of this paradox one would need, himself, to be an employé of the government, of large or small degree. They are many and they are complicated. But an illustration or two will suffice to show what we mean: