The visitor who has seen it once has just begun to see it. A smooth-faced obelisk, devoid of ornament, it would appear the stolidest object in the landscape; in truth, it is as versatile as the clouds. Every change in your position reveals it in a new phase. Go close to it and look up, and its walls seem to rise infinitely and dissolve into the atmosphere; stand on the neighboring hills, and you are tempted to throw a stone over its top; sail down the Potomac, and the slender white shaft is still sending its farewells after you when the city has passed out of sight. It plays chameleon to the weather. It may be gay one moment and grave the next, like the world. Sometimes, in the varying lights, it loses its perspective and becomes merely a flat blade struck against space; an hour later, every line and seam is marked with the crispness of chiseled sculpture. On a fair morning, it is radiant under the first beams of the rising sun; in the full of the moon, it is like a thing from another world--cold, shimmering, unreal. Often in the spring and fall its peak is lost in vapor, and the shaft looks as if it were a tall, thin Ossa penetrating the home of the gods. Again, with its base wrapped in fog and its summit in cloud, it is a symbol of human destiny, emerging from one mystery only to pass into another. Always the same, yet never twice alike, it is to the old Washingtonian a being instinct with life, a personality to be known and loved. It has relatively little to tell the passing stranger, but many confidences for the friend of years. To realize all that it is to us, you must see it on a changeable day. Come with me then to the Capitol, whence, from an outlook on the western terrace, we face a thick and troubled sky. The air is murky. Clouds fringed with gray fleece, which have been hanging so low as to hide the apex of the Monument, are folding back upon themselves in the southern heavens, forming a rampart dark and forbidding. Against this the obelisk is projected, having caught and held one ray of pure sunshine which has found an opening and shot through like a searchlight. It is plain that an atmospheric battle is at hand. The garrulous city seems struck dumb; the timid trees are shivering with apprehension; the voice of the wind is half sob and half warning. The search-ray vanishes as the door of the cloud fort is closed and the rumbling of the bolts is heard behind it. The landscape in the background is blotted from view by eddies of yellow dust, as if a myriad of horsemen were making a tentative charge. Silent and unmoved, the obelisk stands there, a white warrior bidding defiance to the forces of sky and earth. As the subsiding dust marks the retreat of the cavalry, the artillery opens fire. First one masked porthole and then another belches flame, but the sharp crash or dull roar which follows passes quite unnoticed by the champion. Then comes the rattle of musketry, as a sheet of hail sweeps across the field.