that I first caught myself being surprised that the heavy gilded and marmoreal sumptuosity of the decorations recalled the average European palace.  Why should I have been expecting the interior of the Capitol to consist of austere bare walls and unornamented floors?  Perhaps it was due to some thought of Abraham Lincoln.  But whatever its cause, the expectation was naive and derogatory.  The young guide, Jimmy, who by birth and genius evidently belonged to the universal race of guides, was there to keep my ideas right and my eyes open.  He was infinitely precious, and after his own fashion would have done honor to any public monument in the East.  Such men are only bred in the very shadow of genuine history.

“See,” he said, touching a wall.  “Painted by celebrated Italian artist to look like bas-relief!  But put your hand flat against it, and you’ll see it isn’t carved!” One might have been in Italy.

And a little later he was saying of other painting: 

“Although painted in eighteen hundred sixty-five—­forty-six years ago—­you notice the flesh tints are as fresh as if painted yesterday!”

This, I think, was the finest remark I ever heard a guide make—­until this same guide stepped in front of a portrait of Henry Clay, and, after a second’s hesitation, threw off airily, patronizingly: 

“Henry Clay—­quite a good statesman!”

But I also contributed my excursionist’s share to these singular conversations.  In the swathed Senate Chamber I noticed two holland-covered objects that somehow reminded me of my youth and of religious dissent.  I guessed that the daily proceedings of the Senate must be opened with devotional exercises, and these two objects seemed to me to be proper—­why, I cannot tell—­to the United States Senate; but there was one point that puzzled me.

“Why,” I asked, “do you have two harmoniums?”

“Harmoniums, sir!” protested the guide, staggered.  “Those are roll-top desks.”

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.