After the White House, the Capitol is an endless source of delight to those who have come to Washington from afar. A little squad of aged men, who have a wolfish scent for tourists, act as its own particular Reception Committee. These old men, between their cards and the sporting extras of the evening papers, condescend to act as guides to the huge building. We shall spare you the details of a trip through it with them. It is enough to say that they are, in the spirit at least, sight-seeing car lecturers grown into another generation. Their quarrels with the Capitol police are endless. On one memorable occasion, a captain of that really efficient police-force had decided to mark the famous whispering stone in the old Hall of Representatives with a bit of paint. You can read about that whispering stone in any of the tourist-guides which the train-boy sells you on your way to Washington. Suffice it now to say that when you have found this phonetic marvel and have stood upon it your whisper will be heard distinctly in a certain far corner of the gallery of the room. It is an acoustic freak of which the schoolboys out in Racine can tell you better than I. And it is one of the prized assets of the Capitol guides. The police captain forgot that when he set out to mark it.
It came back to him the evening of that day, however, when the building had been cleared. He chanced to cross the old hall and, looking for his marker, found three of the guides upon their knees carefully restoring it to absolute uniformity with its neighbors. And the captain nearly lost his job. He had sought to interfere with prerogative, and prerogative is a particularly sacred thing at the Federal capital—as we shall see in a little while.
*****
Late in a pleasant afternoon all Washington seems to walk in F street. The little girls come out of the matinees, the bigger girls drift out from the tea-rooms, there is a swirl of motor vehicles—gasoline and electric—but the tourist knows not of all this. The gay flammeries of Pennsylvania avenue hold him fascinated. Souvenir shops rivet him to their counters. Post-cards—grave, humorous, abominable—urge themselves upon him. But if all these fail—they have post-cards nowadays of the high schools in each of the little Arizona towns—here upon a counter are the little statuettes of pre-digested currency.
Mr. Lincoln in $10,000 of greenbacks. And yet that money today could not buy one drop of gasoline, let alone an imported touring automobile, for once it has passed through the government's macerating machine it is only fit for the sculptor. Three thousand dollars go into a Benjamin Harrison hat, fifteen thousand into a model of the Washington Monument that looks as if it were about to melt beneath a summer sun. Twenty thousand doll—stay, there is a limit to credulity. And you refuse to buy without a signed certificate from the Treasury Department as to these valuations.
Most of the tourists do buy, however. They seem to be blindly credulous—these folk who feel their way to Washington. It was not so very many spring-times ago that a rumor worked afloat of a dull Sabbath to the effect that the Washington Monument was about to fall. That rumor slipped around the town with amazing rapidity—Washington is hardly more than a gossipy, rumor-filled village after all. Two or three thousand folk went down to the Mall to be present at the fall. No two of them could agree as to the direction in which the shaft would tumble and they all made a long and cautious line that completely encircled it—at a safe distance. After long hours of waiting they all went home. Yet no one was angry. They all seemed to think it part of the day's program.
*****
There is another side of Washington not so funny and tourists, even of the most sedate sort, who stop at the large hotels and who ride about in dignified motor-cars, do not see it. It is the side of heart-burnings. For in no other city of the land is the social code more sharply defined—and regulated. There are many cities in the country and we are telling of them in this book, who draw deep breaths upon exclusiveness. But in none of these save Washington do the folk who do obtain flaunt themselves in the faces of those who do not. The fine old houses of Beacon street, in Boston, and of the Battery down at Charleston may draw themselves apart, but they do it silently and unostentatiously. In the very nature of things in Washington much modesty is quite out of the question.
