“I don’t know who you are,” said a policeman, as he stopped our sea-going hack.  “I don’t know who you are,” he repeated, cautiously, as one accustomed to policing the shahs and grand viziers of the earth, “but it’s my duty to tell you your coachman crossed over on the wrong side of the lamp-post.  It’s not allowed, and he knows it as well as I do.”

We admitted by our shamed silence that we had no special “pull” in Washington; the wise negro said not a word; and we crept away from the policeman’s wrath, and before I knew it we were up against the Washington Monument—­one of those national calamities which ultimately happen to every country, and of which the supreme example is, of course, the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens.

[Illustration:  ON THE STEPS OF THE PORTICO—­THE CAPITOL]

When I drove into the magnificent railway station late that night—­true American rain was descending in sheets—­I was carrying away with me an impression, as it were, of a gigantic plantation of public edifices in a loose tangle and undergrowth of thoroughfares:  which seemed proper for a legislative and administrative metropolis.  I was amused to reflect how the city, like most cities, had extended in precisely the direction in which its founders had never imagined it would extend; and naturally I was astonished by the rapidity of its development. (One of my friends, who was not old, had potted wild game in a marsh that is now a park close to the Capitol.) I thought that the noble wings of the Capitol were architecturally much superior to the central portion of it.  I remembered a dazzling glimpse of the White House as a distinguished little building.  I feared that ere my next visit the indefatigable energy of America would have rebuilt Pennsylvania Avenue, especially the higgledy-piggledy and picturesque and untidy portion of it that lies nearest to the Capitol, and I hoped that in doing so the architects would at any rate not carry the cornice to such excess as it has been carried in other parts of the town.  And, finally, I was slightly scared by the prevalence of negroes.  It seemed to me as if in Washington I had touched the fringe of the negro problem.

* * * * *

It was in a different and a humbler spirit that I went to Boston.  I had received more warnings and more advice about Boston than about all the other cities put together.  And, in particular, the greatest care had been taken to permeate my whole being with the idea that Boston was “different.”  In some ways it proved so to be.  One difference forced itself upon me immediately I left the station for the streets—­the quaint, original odor of the taxis.  When I got to the entirely admirable hotel I found a book in a prominent situation on the writing-table in my room.  In many hotels this book would have been the Bible.  But here it was the catalogue of the hotel library; it ran to a hundred and eighty-two pages.  On the other hand, there was no bar in the hotel, and no smoking-room.  I make no comments; I draw no conclusions; I state the facts.