I READ a letter written by Mrs. President Adams in 1796. In it she complains that there are not nearly lamps enough to light the White House decently, and that the making of the daily fires in all the rooms, “to keep off the ague,” occupies the entire time of one or two servants. She says there are no looking-glasses in the house but “dwarfs.” I think Mrs. President Harrison must have found a very different state of things. It is just like women to complain about there not being looking-glasses!
John West.
My great-grandfather used to be in Washington in Congress, when Daniel Webster was there. My father has told me all about it; they had great speeches. Grandfather heard Henry Clay when he made his wonderful speech. I’d like to have been with him! Father read to us last night about the speech, and in the book it said there were at that time two little boys, one eight years old and the other ten, whom nobody knew anything about until afterwards. One of them went to a primary school in Boston and studied a primer, and the other didn’t go to school at all, but had to work hard. The primer boy was named Sumner, and the other boy was Abraham Lincoln. I guess if the people in Washington had known what those two boys were going to do a little later, they would have been astonished.
Lincoln Stevenson.
My father and mother lived in Washington in 1860. Father says it wasn’t much like a city then; there were no street cars, and they did not light the streets, only Pennsylvania Avenue, and they got their water from pumps or springs. There were no sewers, and the streets were not paved, and the parks were all full of weeds. He told me about it one day last spring when we were in Washington, and sat under the trees in beautiful Stanton Square. I could hardly believe that the lovely city ever looked as he described it. And to think that that was only a little over thirty years ago! Father says the changes seem like a dream to him.
Lilian Prescott.