“The house is on a grand and superb scale,” she wrote to her daughter, “requiring about thirty servants to attend and keep the apartments in proper order, and perform the ordinary business of the house and stables. The lighting the apartments, from the kitchen to the parlor and chambers, is a tax indeed; and the fires we are obliged to keep, to secure us from daily agues, is another very cheering comfort. Bells are wholly wanting, not one single one being hung through the whole house, and promises are all you can obtain. I could content myself almost anywhere three months; but surrounded by forests, can you believe that wood is not to be had, because people cannot be found to cut and cart it! There is not a single apartment finished. We have not the least fence or yard, or other convenience without; and the great unfinished audience-room I make a drying-room of, to hang up the clothes in. The principal stairs are not up, and will not be this winter. The ladies are impatient for a drawing-room; I have no looking-glasses but dwarfs for this house, not a twentieth part lamps enough to light it.” Mrs. Adams’s consolatory reflection that she would have to endure these conditions only three months, was probably shared by many of the thirty-two Senators and one hundred and five Representatives who, on the high hill to the east, shivered and shook and passed unflattering criticisms on everybody who had had a hand in the construction of the Capitol. Only the old north wing was in condition for use, and not all of that. The Senate met in what is now the Supreme Court chamber; the House took its chances wherever there was room, ending its travels in an uncomfortable box of a hall commonly styled “the oven.” Most of the members had made some study of the L’Enfant chart before coming to Washington. One of them put into writing his impressions as he looked about and tried to identify the public improvements he had been led to expect. None of the streets was recognizable, he said, with the possible exception of a road having two buildings on each side of it, which was called New Jersey Avenue. The “magnificent Pennsylvania Avenue,” connecting the Capitol with the President’s House, was for nearly the entire distance a deep morass covered with wild bushes, through which a passage had been hewn. The roads in every direction were muddy and unimproved. The only attempt at a sidewalk had been made with chips of stone left from building the Capitol, and this was little used because the sharp edges cut the walker’s shoes in dry weather, and in wet weather covered them with white mortar. Another member declared that there was nothing in sight in Washington but scrub oak, and that, since there was “only one good tavern within a day’s march,” many members had to live in Georgetown and drive to and from the daily sessions of Congress in a rickety coach. And a particularly disgusted critic, not content with recording that “there are but few houses in any place, and