If only the floor could have opened and swallowed me up, as it opens
and swallows up the grand piano at the Thomas concerts in Chicago!

Neither the Senate Chamber nor the Congress Chamber was as imposing to
me as the much less spacious former Senate Chamber and the former
Congress Chamber. The old Senate Chamber, being now transferred to the
uses of supreme justice, was closed on the day of our visit, owing to
the funeral of a judge. Europeans would have acquiesced in the firm
negative of its locked doors. But my friends, being American, would not
acquiesce. The mere fact that the room was not on view actually
sharpened their desire that I should see it. They were deaf to
refusals.... I saw that room. And I was glad that I saw it, for in its
august simplicity it was worth seeing. The spirit of the early history
of the United States seemed to reside in that hemicycle; and the crape
on the vacated and peculiar chair added its own effect.

[Illustration: ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE]

My first notion on entering the former Congress Chamber was that I was
in presence of the weirdest collection of ugly statues that I had ever
beheld. Which impression, the result of shock, was undoubtedly false. On
reflection I am convinced that those statues of the worthies of the
different States are not more ugly than many statues I could point to in
no matter what fane, museum, or palace of Europe. Their ugliness is only
different from our accustomed European ugliness. The most crudely ugly
mural decorations in the world are to be found all over Italy--the home
of sublime frescos. The most atrociously debased architecture in the
world is to be found in France--the home of sober artistic tradition.
Europe is simply peppered everywhere with sculpture whose appalling