vivid verdure, and sunbeams are pouring over dome and obelisk and
pillared lines of marble till they shine with dazzling lustre through
the light screens of greenery. Then come the "kettle-drums," with
sunset looking in for company; then the receptions are held in rooms
full of sunshine, with open windows letting in the outside fragrance
and bird-song and glimpses of charming landscape, or they are turned
into fêtes-champêtres in the surrounding gardens; then come the
riding-parties to the Falls, where last night's sylph may be to-day's
Amazon in the midst of exceedingly grand scenery. Then, too, is the
time for the moonlit boating where the Potomac narrows between steep
and romantic banks of a sylvan wildness, and where the long oars of
the swift rowers bear you as if on wings; for picnics to Rock Creek,
a region of rude beauty, where the woods abound in lupines and pink
azaleas, and the great white dogwood boughs stretch away into the
darkness of the forest like a press of moonbeams, and where at dark
your horses ford the stream and climb the hill, and bring you over the
Georgetown Heights, past villas half-guessed by starlight among their
gardens and fountains, and in by a market picturesque with a hundred
torches flaring over the heads of mules and negroes and venders and
higglers--piles of game, crisp vegetables and scarlet berries. And
with this comes the excursion down river, sheet after sheet of the
shining stream opening on woody loveliness remote in azure hazes,
to Mount Vernon among its blossoming magnolias and rosy Judas trees,
where the great tomb stands open with its sarcophagi, and where
Eleanor Custis's harpsichord keeps strange company with the grim key
of the Bastile that has never been moved since Washington hung it on
the nail--where the quaint old rooms and verandahs and conservatories
invite the guests, and the garden with its breast-high hedges of
spicy box invites the lovers. Now the few ancestral mansions embower
themselves in an aristocratic seclusion of trees and vines that shut