The door on our left leads, through a short corridor, into what was once the Hall of Representatives. It is now known officially as the Hall of Statuary, but to irreverent critics as the National Chamber of Horrors, because of the varied assortment of marble and bronze images collected there. The room is semicircular, with a domed ceiling, a great arch and supporting pillars on its flat side, and a colonnade lining the horseshoe. During the forty years that it was used for legislative purposes, a rostrum holding the Speaker’s table and chair filled the arch, and the desks of the Representatives were arranged in concentric curves to face it. Overlooking the chamber, and following most of the rear wall, ran a narrow gallery for visitors who did not enjoy the privileges of the floor; it derived an air of comfort from curtains hung between the columns of the colonnade and looped back so as to produce the effect of a tier of opera-boxes. Stay in the room a while, and you will understand why, for many years, the complaint of its acoustic properties was so constant, and a demand for a better hall so strong: it is a wonderful whispering gallery. There are spots in the tiled pavement where you can stand and hear the slightest sound you make come back from some point before or behind you, over your head, or under your feet. Go to the place where the semicircle ends on one side of the room, and I will go to the corresponding place on the other side, and, by speaking into the vertical fissures between the wall and the pillars at the two extremities of the great arch, we can converse in the lowest tones with as much ease as if we were side by side instead of a hundred feet apart. A vivid imagination can people this hall with ghosts. Here some of the fiercest forensic battles were fought in early days over protective tariffs, internal improvements, and, above all, negro slavery. Here it was that Randolph’s piping voice denounced the Northern “dough-faces,” and here Wilmot launched his historic proviso. Here Alexander H. Stephens made his last effort to resuscitate the moribund Whig party, while Abraham Lincoln listened to his argument from a seat on the same side of the chamber. Here John Quincy Adams drew upon himself the fire of an incensed opposition by championing the people’s right to petition Congress, and here he fell to the floor a dying paralytic. Here John Marshall, the greatest of our Chief Justices, administered the oath of office to two early Presidents. And here it was that Henry Clay, as Speaker, delivered his address of welcome to Lafayette as the guest of the nation, and listened with becoming gravity to the Marquis’s response--which, as it afterward appeared, owed its excellent English to the fact that Clay had composed it for the most part himself.