“Yes.  And we saw the President!” cried Nan.

And then they told all about it.

The Bobbseys spent the rest of the day visiting their friends, the Martins, and returned to their hotel in the evening.  They planned to have other pleasure going about the city to see the sights the next day and the day following.

“Could we ever go into the house where the President lives?” asked Nan of her father that night.

“Yes, we can visit the White House or, rather, one room in it,” said Mr. Bobbsey.  “What they call the ‘East Room’ is the one in which visitors are allowed.  Perhaps we may go there tomorrow, if Mr. Martin and I can finish some business we are working on.”

After breakfast the next morning the Bobbsey twins were glad to hear their father say that he would take them to the White House; and, a little later, in company with other visitors, they were allowed to enter the home of the President, and walk about the big room on the east side of the White House.

“I’m going to sit down on one of the chairs,” said Nan.  “Maybe it will be one that the President once sat on.”

“Very likely it will be,” laughed Mrs. Bobbsey, as Nan picked out a place into which she “wiggled.”  From the chair she smiled at her brothers and sister, and they, too, took turns sitting in the same chair.

Bert found a pin on the thick green carpet in the room.  The carpet was almost as thick and green as the moss in the woods, and how Bert ever saw the tiny pin I don’t know.  But he had very sharp eyes.

“What are you going to do with it?” asked his father.

“Just keep it,” the boy answered.  “Maybe it’s a pin the President’s wife once used in her clothes.”

“Oh, you think it’s a souvenir!” laughed Mrs. Bobbsey, as Bert stuck the pin in the edge of his coat.  And for a long time he kept that common, ordinary pin, and he used to show it to his boy friends, and tell them where he found it.

“The White House President’s pin,” he used to call it.

“And now,” said Mr. Bobbsey, as they came from the White House, “I think we’ll have time to see the Monument before lunch.”

“That’s good!” exclaimed Nan.  “And shall we go up inside it?”

“I think so,” her father replied.

Washington Monument, as a good many of you know, is not a solid shaft of stone.  It is built of great granite blocks, as a building is built, and is, in fact, a building, for it has several little rooms in the base; rooms where men can stay who watch the big pointed shaft of stone, and other rooms where are kept the engines that run the elevator.

The bottom part of Washington Monument is square, and on one side is a doorway.  Above the base the shaft itself stretches up over five hundred feet in height, and the top part is pointed, like the pyramids of the desert.  The monument shaft is hollow, and there is a stairway inside, winding around the elevator shaft.  Some people walk up the stairs to get to the top of the monument, where they can look out of small windows over the city of Washington and the Potomac River.  But most persons prefer to go up and down in the elevator, though it is slow and, if there are many visitors they have to await their turns.