it is unique as it is precious. There are rings of bishops and kings;
jeweled baubles from Egyptian tombs and gold-wrought ornaments of the
Montezumas; a cameo where a single face with its shadows makes six
laughing and six weeping outlines; a cat's-eye quartz to which the
one the king of Siam has is perhaps the mate; diamonds and pearls,
amethysts and topazes, beryls and opals, single emeralds of rare
beauty and doublets of great size, rubies of the real pigeon's blood,
and sapphires whose heart is blue as the bluest midnight, but whose
angles refract a radiance red as fire; chains of carved beads; seals,
intaglios,--to almost all of them some legend attaching.

Here passes a person very different from either of these--a tall and
martial figure, a filibustero in every clime, hunted with blood-hounds
in the Spanish sierras when Don Carlos needed him, floating naked
on bladders down the Danube, with despatches in his mouth, when
the Hungarians were sore pressed. Here goes a jolly, happy man, who
contentedly lets title and coronet go by across the sea while he
practices law in the Patent Office. Here on the avenue go up and
down all these people, and countless others with stories as pointed,
whether it be such a story as that of Captain Suter, whose treacherous
servant bartered all the gold of California for a single drink, or of
this black man who to-day is free and yesterday was a slave.

But attractive as this picturesque grouping of avenues and edifices
may be, the attraction does not belong to the outside alone: inside
the great doors of the majestic halls you will find that time has
wings while you pass in review the trophies of all the zones, and
of the meteoric heavens too, preserved in the Smithsonian, or the
archives of the country in the Patent Office. This latter is indeed a
place of enchantment. The Pompeiian hall has something of the air of a