votaries of folly.

Scattered helter-skelter over an immense surface, cut up into scalene
triangles, the oddity of its plan makes Washington a succession of
surprises which never fail to vex and astonish the stranger, be he ever
so highly endowed as to the phrenological bump of locality. Depending
upon the hap-hazard start the ignoramus may chance to make, any
particular house or street is either nearer at hand or farther off than
the ordinary human mind finds it agreeable to believe. The first duty of
the new-comer is to teach his nether extremities to avoid instinctively
the hypothenuse of the street-triangulation, and the last lesson the
resident fails to learn is which of the shortcuts from point to point
is the least lengthy. Beyond a doubt, the corners of the streets were
constructed upon a cold and brutal calculation of the greatest possible
amount of oral sin which disappointed haste and irritated anxiety are
capable of committing; nor is any relief to the tendency to profanity
thus engendered afforded by the inexcusable nomenclature of the streets
and avenues,--a nomenclature in which the resources of the alphabet, the
arithmetic, the names of all the States of the Union, and the Presidents
as well, are exhausted with the most unsystematic profligacy. A man not
gifted with supernatural acuteness, in striving to get from Brown's
Hotel to the General Post-Office, turns a corner and suddenly finds
himself nowhere, simply because he is everywhere,--being at the instant
upon three separate streets and two distinct avenues. And, as a further
consequence of the scalene arrangement of things, it happens that the
stranger in Washington, however civic his birth and education may have
been, is always unconsciously performing those military evolutions
styled marching to the right or left oblique,--acquiring thereby, it is
said, that obliquity of the moral vision--which sooner or later afflicts
every human being who inhabits this strange, lop-sided city-village.