more, and they were gone. In 1868, they were like the town
itself, changing but not changed. La Fayette Square was society.
Within a few hundred yards of Mr. Clark Mills's nursery monument
to the equestrian seat of Andrew Jackson, one found all one's
acquaintance as well as hotels, banks, markets and national
government. Beyond the Square the country began. No rich or
fashionable stranger had yet discovered the town. No literary or
scientific man, no artist, no gentleman without office or
employment, had ever lived there. It was rural, and its society
was primitive. Scarcely a person in it had ever known life in a
great city. Mr. Evarts, Mr. Sam Hooper, of Boston, and perhaps
one or two of the diplomatists had alone mixed in that sort of
world. The happy village was innocent of a club. The one-horse
tram on F Street to the Capitol was ample for traffic. Every
pleasant spring morning at the Pennsylvania Station, society met
to bid good-bye to its friends going off on the single express.
The State Department was lodged in an infant asylum far out on
Fourteenth Street while Mr. Mullett was constructing his
architectural infant asylum next the White House. The value of
real estate had not increased since 1800, and the pavements were
more impassable than the mud. All this favored a young man who
had come to make a name. In four-and-twenty hours he could know
everybody; in two days everybody knew him.

After seven years' arduous and unsuccessful effort to explore
the outskirts of London society, the Washington world offered an
easy and delightful repose. When he looked round him, from the
safe shelter of Mr. Evarts's roof, on the men he was to work with
-- or against -- he had to admit that nine-tenths of his acquired
education was useless, and the other tenth harmful. He would have