Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/40

 harbored the Department of the Interior. The departments of State, of War, and of the Navy were quartered in small, very insignificant-looking houses which might have been the dwellings of some well-to-do shopkeepers who did not care for show. There was not one solidly built-up street in the whole city—scarcely a block without gaps of dreary emptiness. The houses were not yet numbered. The way they were designated was by calling them “the first of the five” or the “fifth of the seven” on Pennsylvania Avenue, or on Seventh Street, as the case might be. Pennsylvania Avenue, not far from the Capitol, was crossed by a brook called Goosecreek, alias “the Tiber,” which was spanned by a wooden bridge; and I was told—perhaps falsely—that congressmen in a fuddled state, going home in the dark after an animated night-session, would sometimes miss the bridge and fall into the water, to be fished out with difficulty by the sergeants-at-arms and their assistants.

The hotel at which I stopped, the “National,” the same in which Henry Clay had died less than two years before, was dingy beyond description, and there were hardly half a dozen residences, if as many, in the whole town, that had the appearance of refined, elegant, and comfortable homes. The streets, ill-paved, if paved at all, were constantly covered with mud or dust. But very few of the members of Congress “kept house.” Most of them took their meals in “messes,” having clubbed together for that purpose. Washington was called “the city of magnificent distances.” But there was nothing at the ends of those distances, and, excepting the few public buildings, very little that was in any way interesting or pleasing. In many of the streets, geese, chickens, pigs, and cows had still a scarcely disputed right of way. The city had throughout a slouchy, unenterprising, unprogressive appearance,