Oriental paradise, where birds sing, flowers bloom, and the sounds of low sweet music ever greet the ear of the favored visitor.  The accompanying engraving will give some idea of the general appearance of the entrance to the harem, with its burnished roof of green and gold, its graceful turrets and mosque-like pinnacles, and its base of pure white marble, chaste and elegant.  But neither language nor pictorial illustration can convey to the mind any adequate realization of its bewildering beauty; and Count de Beauvoir but echoes the language of every traveler who has visited Bangkok when he declares, in his recent work, that “its temples and palaces are the most splendid of even the gorgeous East.”

FANNIE R. FEUDGE.

LIFE AT THE NATIONAL CAPITAL.

There are few cities where life is so well put upon the stage as in Washington, so far as opportunity for satisfaction and enjoyment is considered.  A certain grandeur characterizes all the approaches to the city.  From the west you descend upon it by a way that leads out of cloudy mountain-chains and over chasms spanned by an awful trestle-work; from the south, passing our national Mecca, the Tomb of Washington, your highway is the picturesque Potomac, which here, nearly three hundred miles from the sea, broadly embays itself as if to mirror the magnificence of the place; from the north the track winds along the banks of the Delaware, white with its coastwise commerce, in and out among the beautiful bridges that arch the Schuylkill, across the broad Susquehanna, past blazing forges and foundries, and over the long and lonely expanses of the two Gunpowder Rivers—­desert wastes of water, stretching for miles away without a sail, without a light, in the melancholy grandeur of a very dream of desolation.  If it is at night that you step from the station, halfway down the distance you presently see the ray of a street-lamp throw up the facade of the Patent Office in broken light and shadow; you see before you and under the hill the twinkle of scattered groups of light; you see, far off, the long row of the Treasury columns half lost in darkness, and you will remember pictured scenes of bivouacs among the ruins of Baalbec.  And if it is in the morning that you arrive, fresh from the turbulence of Broadway, from the quaint and tortuous hillside lanes of Boston, from the elegant monotony of Philadelphia, the impression made upon you is still not very different.  Though you are in the heart of the place, it seems to lie before you like a city in the distance.  Now the mist is stripped away from some massive marble pile; now a prospect opens of river and wood and the pillared heights of Arlington; now a lofty heaven reveals a waning moon, it may be—­for every square has its horizon—­the morning-star flames out, a red and yellow sunrise burns behind the silver cloud of the Capitol dome, and the whole city, in its splendor and its squalor, bared to view, gives you a suffocating sense of the pettiness of all other places before the opulence of sky, the width and height, the light and space and air, that Washington affords.