The Vice-president’s room has been more constantly in use as a retiring room for its occupant during the intervals when he is not presiding over the sessions of the Senate. On its wall has hung for many years a little gilt-framed mirror for which John Adams, while Vice-president, paid forty dollars, and which was brought with the other appurtenances of the Senate from Philadelphia when the Government removed its headquarters to Washington. Many of the frugal founders of the republic were scandalized at the extravagance of the purchase, and one gravely introduced in the Senate a resolution censuring Adams for having drawn thus heavily upon the public funds “to gratify his personal vanity.” What these good men would say if they were to revisit the Capitol now and see in the same room with the forty-dollar mirror a silver inkstand that cost two hundred dollars and a clock that cost a thousand, we can only imagine. It was in this room, by the way, that Vice-president Wilson died in November, 1875, after an attack of illness which suddenly overcame him at the Capitol and was too severe to justify his being carried to his home. On the floor below are two other points of interest. We shall do well to descend, not by the broad marble staircases in the north wing, but by an old iron-railed and curved flight of stone steps a little south of the Supreme Court. Note, in passing, its columns, as truly American in design as those above-stairs to which attention has already been directed; for they conventionalize our Indian corn, the stalks making the body of a pillar and the leaves and ears the capital. The first point we shall visit is the crypt, which is directly under the rotunda. It is a vaulted chamber originally intended as a resting-place for the body of George Washington. There was to have been a circular opening in the ceiling, so that visitors in the rotunda could look down upon the sarcophagus, above which a suspended taper was to be kept continually burning. The light was duly hung there, and not extinguished for many years; but as Washington’s heirs were unwilling to allow his remains to leave Mount Vernon, the rest of the plan was abandoned. A little way north of the crypt we come to the room that the Supreme Court occupied for about forty [Illustration: _Rock Creek_]