them in with their birds and flowers and sunshine, and the Van Ness
Place, where Washington came to lay out the city, adorns all its
ancient and mossy magnificence with fresh drapery of leaves and
flowers. The halls of Congress, too, are still open all day, the drama
growing livelier as the adjournment draws nearer; and at evening the
drives are thronged with fine equipages winding down the Fourteenth
street way, out by the Soldiers' Home, through Harewood, or up by
the Anacostia branch and the wild Maryland hill-roads, where
wide-stretching pictures are revealed between the forest trees, while
sometimes one sees, with its two rivers--one shining like silver, one
red and turbid--the city lying far away, much of its outline veiled
and the color of its baked brick and stone and marble mellowed in the
distance, till through the quivering air and among all its towering
trees it looks like a vision of antique temples in the midst of
gardens of flowers. And now the numberless squares and triangles and
grass-plots of the city are green as Dante's newly-broken emeralds,
are a miracle of spotless deutzia and golden laburnum, honeysuckle and
jasmine: half the houses are covered with ivies and grapevines; the
Smithsonian grounds surround their dark and castellated group of
buildings in a wilderness of bloom; and the rose has come--such roses
as Sappho and Hafiz sung; deep-red roses that burn in the sun, roses
that are almost black, so purple is their crimson, roses that are
stainless white, long-stemmed, in generous clusters, making the air
about them an intoxication in itself--roses fit to crown Anacreon.
Twice a week during all this sweet season the Marine Band has been
blowing out its music in the President's Grounds and in the Capitol
Park late in the warm afternoon, and every one promenades in gala
attire beneath the trees and over the shady slopes till the tunes die
with the twilight, and many a long-delaying love-affair culminates as
the stars come out and the perfumed wind casts down great shadows from