the finest of Layard's collections at Nineveh.

The dining rooms are admirable examples of magnificent distance. The
room is long, the tables are long, the kitchen is a long way off, and
the waiters a long time going and coming. The meals are long,--so
long that there is literally no end to them; they are eternal. It is
customary to mark certain points in the endless route of appetite with
mile-stones named breakfast, dinner, and supper; but these points have
no more positive existence than the imaginary lines and angles of the
geometrician. Breakfast runs entirely through dinner into supper, and
dinner ends with coffee, the beginning of breakfast. Estimating the
duration of dinner by the speed of an ordinary railroad-train, it is
twenty miles from soup to fish, and fifty from turkey to nuts. But
distance, however magnificent, does not lend enchantment to a meal. The
wonder is that the knives and forks are not made to correspond in length
with the repasts,--in which case the latter would be pitchforks, and the
former John-Brown pikes.

The people of Washington are as various, mixed, dissimilar, and
contrasted as the edifices they inhabit. Within the like area, which is
by no means a small one, the same number of dignitaries can be found
nowhere else on the face of the globe,--nor so many characters of
doubtful reputation. If the beggars of Dublin, the cripples of
Constantinople, and the lepers of Damascus should assemble in
Baden-Baden during a Congress of Kings, then Baden-Baden would resemble
Washington. Presidents, Senators, Honorables, Judges, Generals,
Commodores, Governors, and the Ex's of all these, congregate here as
thick as pick-pockets at a horse-race or women at a wedding in church.
Add Ambassadors, Plenipotentiaries, Lords, Counts, Barons, Chevaliers,
the great and small fry of the Legations, Captains, Lieutenants,