[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 mediocrity defies competition.  But when the European meets ugly sculpture or any ugly form of art in the New World, his instinct is to exclaim, “Of course!” His instinct is to exclaim, “This beats everything!” The attitude will not bear examination.  And lo!  I was adopting it myself.

“And here’s Frances Willard!” cried, ecstatically, a young woman in one of the numerous parties of excursionists whose more deliberate paths through the Capitol we were continually crossing in our swift course.

And while, upon the spot where John Quincy Adams fell, I pretended to listen to the guide, who was proving to me from a distance that the place was as good a whispering-gallery as any in Europe, I thought:  “And why should not Frances Willard’s statue be there?  I am glad it is there.  And I am glad to see these groups of provincials admiring with open mouths the statues of the makers of their history, though the statues are chiefly painful.”  And I thought also:  “New York may talk, and Chicago may talk, and Boston may talk, but it is these groups of provincials who are the real America.”  They were extraordinarily like people from the Five Towns—­that is to say, extraordinarily like comfortable average people everywhere.

We were outside again, under one of the enormous porticos of the Capitol.  The guide was receiving his well-earned dollar.  The faithful fellow had kept nicely within the allotted limit of half an hour.

“Now we’ll go and see the Congressional Library,” said my particular friend.

But I would not.  I had put myself in a position to retort to any sight-seeing American in Europe that I had seen his Capitol in thirty minutes, and I was content.  I determined to rest on my laurels.  Moreover, I had discovered that conventional sight-seeing is a very exhausting form of activity.  I would visit neither the Library of Congress, nor the Navy Department, nor the Pension Bureau, nor the Dead-Letter Museum, nor the Zoological Park, nor the White House, nor the National Museum, nor the Lincoln Museum, nor the Smithsonian Institution, nor the Treasury, nor any other of the great spectacles of Washington.  We just resumed the sea-going hack and drove indolently to and fro in avenues and parks, tasting the general savor of the city’s large pleasantness.  And we had not gone far before we got into the clutches of the police.