More climbing will bring you to an outside perch, which forms a sort of collar for the lantern surmounting the dome. Now open a plainly printed map of Washington and hold it so that the points of the compass on the map correspond with those of the city below you. With a five minutes’ walk around the base of the lantern, to give you the view from every side, you will have mastered the whole scheme designed by L’Enfant. Here are the four quarters--northeast, southeast, southwest, northwest--as clearly spread before you on the surface of the earth as on the paper in your hand. Here is the Mall, with its grass and trees, leading up to the Washington Monument and abutting on the executive reservation where stand the White House, the Treasury, and the State, War and Navy Department buildings. Well out to the northward you can descry a tower which fixes the site of the Soldiers’ Home, and to the southward the Potomac, flowing past the War College and the Navy Yard. East of you loom up the hills of Anacostia. On all sides you see the lettered streets running east and west, intersected by the numbered streets running north and south, while, cutting both diagonally at various angles, but in pursuance of a systematic and easily grasped plan, are the avenues named in honor of the various States of the Union. Once let this chart fasten itself in your mind, and there is no reason why, total stranger though you may be, you should have any difficulty in finding your way about Washington. [Illustration: _Capitol, from New Jersey Avenue_] CHAPTER IV THESE OUR LAWMAKERS