DESCRIPTION OP THE CITY OF WASHINGTON.

Otago Witness, Issue 658, 9 July 1864, Page 20

DESCRIPTION OP THE CITY OF WASHINGTON.

Augustus Sala, the " Special Commissioner " of the " London Daily Telegraph," thus graphically describes the City of Washington : —

I have been endeavouring many hours, but with indifferent success, to determine in my own mind what Washington is like. That it resembles in any way the metropolis of a great, powerful, and wealthy commonwealth, can at once, without much iear of contradiction, be denied. It conlains, certainly, some notable public buildings, but they are mattered far and wide, with all kinds of incongruous environments, producing upon the stranger a perplexed impression that the British Museum has suddenly migrated to the centre of an exhausted brickfield, where rubbish may be shot; or that St. Paul's Cathedral, washed quite white, and stuck upon stone stilts, has been transferred to the great desert of Sahara, and called a Capitol. There is a perpetual so ution of continuity at Washington. There is no cohesion about Pennsylvania avenue; its houses aie as Hudibras's story of the bear and the fiddle — begun and broke off in the middle. It is an architectural conundrum which nobody can guess, and in which I candidly believe there is no meaning 1 . The Vitmviuses and Palladios of America have perpetrated a vast practical joke, and called it Washington. There is no beginning, no centre, and no end to Washington. It is the most bogus of towns— a shin-plaster in bricks and mortar and marble. The people seem to be very fond of building houses, but when tiiey have run up three or four stories which threaten to attain the altitude of the Tower of Babel, the confusion of tongues sets in ; t c builders abandon their works, DUt, nothing disheartened, erect three or four stories of fresh houses elsewhere. It is said of those patrons of the drama who habitually avail themselves of half price, that they have seen nothing but denouements. Washington, on the con trary, is a collection of first acts without any catastrophes. It presents a converse to Mercutio's description of his wound; its avenues are as deep as wells, and its blocks as wide as church doors , but they do not serve any purpose that I am aware of. Washington will be, when completed, the most magnificent city on this side the Atlantic, and it is not quite begun yet. We are still at the soup and fish, and have not got to the first entree. Never was there so interminable an overture. " Two piastres more," cries the Arab funambulist, uu worthily parodied by the Londonstreet motintehank, "and the ass shall ascend the ladder." But those piastres are never forthcoming, and the donkey never goes up. Only two hundred millions of dollars more, and two hundred thousand inhabitants, and Washington would be able to rival the Empire City and the Crescent City, and all the other cities to which the Americans have given, to use the diction of Mr Artemus Ward, " manglorious and spaaglorious " appellatires. Pendcnte lite, Washington doesn't precisely languish, but it "wallows in the dust like an eel in a sand-basket, delicious when fried or stewed, but slightly repulsive to the sight before he is skinned or cooked. Washington wiJl be, I have no doubt, some day uproariously splendid; but ut preseut it isn't anything. It is in the District of Columbia, and the :*tate of the Future. And yet I must, for the sake of those who will never probably visit this rambling mass of streete without houses, and houses without streets, liken it to something. Well, it is like a jumbled up j collection of children's toy villages seen through the opera- glass of the King of Brobdignag. Again, it is not unlike the Old Kent Road, grown out of all patience. Stay, it is like Brentford run mad, with a dash of Highgate out of its wits, and a spice of Barnet at the fair time— for ragged horse-flesh is here abundantr-the whole mingled with Holborn Hill, and set in the midst of J>iuisbury Plains. After this, imagine a tohobohu of Canterbury Halls and dancing saloons, government offices and old clothes' shops, Bath and Cheltenham private mansions and log cabins, oyster?, negroes, lagerbeer, mules, oxen, waggons, ladies in crinolines and loafers in " sit on ] 'em" hats, and the very faintest notion of Washington may begin to dawn upon you. Willard's H otel, notwithstanding, is a wonderful place. Opinions may differ as to the amount of personal comfort to be obtained there, and it is by no means rare to hear Americans assert the preferability of private lodgings over the huge, noisy, caravanserai of Congiessopolis, i here is a drawback, however, in giving practical effect to such a preference, inasmuch as private apartment* are all but impossible to procure. Our cousins are not a lodg-ing-letting people. Mrs Lirriper would not be at home here. The omniverous lodging-house cat is an animal happily unknown to the Buflbns and Cuviers of the States. To keep an hotel, •indeed, or a hotel, as grammatical precisians on this side persist on the word being pronounced, is accounted a grand, wise, and beautiful thing; and next to the President of the United States, the commander of the array of the Po'omac, the conductor of a railway ear, and the editor of the " New York Knuckleduster," I have very little doubt that an hotelkeeper is about as remarkable and important a personage as can be met with in a country where nine out of every ten individuals you meet are presumedly remarkable and confessedly important. You may keep a boarding-house too without derogating to any great extent from

your dignity; although; as a rule, a lady who j takes boarders commands more respect than a 1 man engaged in the same vocation would do; but you mustn't let lodgings— it is "mean;" and, above all human frailties, the Americans, to their honour, abhor meanness. Thus, failing furnished lodgings and a " man of the house, or worse still, a Af agaera who lives on her lodger, Willard's becomes in most cases Hobson's choice. " I have stayed at Willard's for twenty years," an acquaintance recently remarked, " and for twenty years I have declared I would never go to Willard's again." Tnere are two or three most ostensibly first-class hotels, but -virtually there is but one step from Willard's to the most comfortless and the groggiest taverns. So you go to Willavd's and grumble, or else grin, shrug your shoulders, and bear the heat, the noise, the dust, the smoke, the expectoration, the scramble for eatables, and the struggle for drinkables precisely as you happen to be a philosopher or otherwise. After nil, it is something to be continually jostling senators in the hall and members of the House of Representatives on the staircase. You can scarcely fail either to gain some salutary insight into tiie practical equality which in many instances marks American society; for neither senator nor representative, governor of State, nor general in the army, millionaire, merchant, nor roving English dandy, is a bit better off, or treated with one whit more deference at Willard's, than the roughest specimen of a bagman in the dry goods line, or the poorest suitor for Government employment who has come up to Washington with the hope of getting a consulate, and would be glad to get a lighthouse.

Insect Language.— ln your paper of 26ih November, you published a short article on the " Antennal Language of Insects," which induces me to send you the following account of an incident which happened in my own experience ;— In 1841 I boarded at a hotel where my room was much infested with red ants, and was in the habit of keeping a,plate of cake which was constantly overrun by them, though I removed it from place to place, and finally locked it up, first in one drawer of my bureau, and then in another, in endeavours to keep it from their ravages, but all to no avail. I then, by placing si chair on the top of a table, contrived to drive a nair into the ceiling of my room, to which I attached a string, and suspended thereto a small basket in which I placed the cake. That evening I thought that I had outwitted the ants, but to my dismay when I awoke the next morning: the ants were descending and ascending the string by thousands, and the basket was filled with the little depredators on my stock of cake. I next procured a soup-plate, which I filled witk water, and placed it on my bureau; in the soup plate I placed a cup, and on the top of the cup, covered with a napkin, one end of which accidentally touched the wall, my plate of cake. The ants came up in crowds, and clambered over the sides of the soup-plate, but they could not cross the water. At last one stray one got on the wall, and, coming to the corner of the napkin, found it gave him access to the cake, and immediately returned to the stream of ants which were ascending the bureau to the soup-plate, and stopped each one, touching its antennae with its its own. Immediately the whole throng turned from their route aud followed him, while he, retracing his steps, led tham to the wall, and thence to the corner of the napkin, and in a few minutes the plate of cake was swarming with hordes of red ants, who had thus regained access to their coveted treasure. A clearer ca j e of information conveyed by "antennal language" 1 never saw.

The Value of Practical Knowledge. — Of the use 3of practical knowledge we recently saw an illustration. A mammoth sexngona! crystal was shown to us by its owner. Mr Mitchell. It is nearly a foot in diameter, and about eighteen inches long. Next to a specimen in Barnum's Museutn,lt is the largest we have ever seen. The base of the specimen is opaque quartz rock ; the other portion is as clear as crystal. It was found by the Rer. Edmund Craie Mitchell, on the farm of Dr. Johnson, near Ellicott's Mills, Md. The young divine was on a visit to Dr. Johnson. From the house a path leads to a spring that supplies the family with water. Mr Mitchell, walking with Dr. Johnson in the path, observed" a stone" about an inch above the ground.—" There's a splendid specimen," said he. -"Of what?" asked the Doctor.— ll Why, of crystal quartz." was the reply. The Doctor said he had passed that stone for thirty years, and knew if to be nothing more than a common paving stone. Mr Mitchell asked leave to wrench it up. A pick was produced, and, to the surprise of Dr. Johnson, the "stone" was buried about eighteen inches deep, and beneath the ground was a perfect six-sided prism of crystal, almost as pellucid as French cut glass. The young man knew enough of geology to recognise it by the butt end, above the grouud, though none but an expert would have seen in it anything but an ordinary boulder, on a small scale. A little learning mny be a dangerous thing; but somehow or other knowledge is quite as productive as ignorance. — American Paper.

Paying for thb Sight.— There is an old farmer in Hampshire, noted for his tpreediness and his keen look out for something by which he m ayturn a penny, honestly, or (he isn't particular) the reverse. A little time ago, he became the possessor of a very large hog. It was aoon noised abroad, and people began to call on the old man to see the "monstrosity." A gentleman from Southampton was stopping for a short time in the village, and hearing of the "porcine," and so much said about it, desired to see tbe sight, and having obtained directions as to the "locale," started for the spot. Arrived there, he met the old uentleman, and inquired about the " animal." " Well, yes, 1 ' the old fellow said : "he'd gotsich a hog; a mighty big 'un ; but he thought he'd have to charge him about a shillin' for lookln' at him;" The gentleman looked at the old man for a minute or so; pulled out the desired coin, handed it to him. and started off. "Hold'on" says the other ; ''don't you want to see the hog 1" —" No," said the gentleman, " I have seen as big a hog as I want to see !" and off he went.

A Cheap Horse. — At Horsham a farmer had a horse for sale, and it was taken to the blacksmith to be shod, and left there till called for. Some thief, it appears, must have been standing by and heard the order, for as soon as the shoewas on, he went and asked if the mare was ready. The reply was, «* Yes." He paid sixpence.for the shoeing, took the mare, and walked of! with the greatest sang-Jroid— but whither, no one knows,

A Blacksmith's Toast.— The proprietor of a forge, not remarkable for correctness of language, but who, by honest industry, had realised a comfortable independence, being called upon at a social meeting for a toast, gave, "Swwsstoforgevy!"