Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

The Prince went over the building, and gained an idea of what it would be like on completion from the plans. He also surprised his guides by his intimate knowledge of Lincoln's life and his intense admiration for him.

At the hospital, shortly after, he visited two thousand of "My comrades in arms," as he called them. Outside the hospital on the lawns were many men who had been wounded at Château Thierry, some in wheeled chairs. Seeing them, the Prince swung aside from his walk to the hospital entrance and chatted with them, before entering the wards to speak with others of the wounded men.

On leaving the hospital he was held up. A Red Cross nurse ran up to him and "tagged" him, planting the little Red Cross button in his coat and declaring that the Prince was enrolled in the District Chapter. The Prince very promptly countered with a dollar bill, the official subscription, saying that his enrolment must be done in proper style and on legal terms.

In the afternoon, the Prince utilized his free time in making a call on the widow of Admiral Dewey, spending a few minutes in interesting conversation with her.

The evening was given over to one of the most brilliant scenes of the whole tour. At the head of the splendid staircase of white marble in the Congress Library he held a reception of all the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, their wives and their families.

Even to drive to such a reception was to experience a thrill.

As the Prince drove down the straight and endless avenues that strike directly through Washington to the Capitol, like spokes to the hub of a vast wheel, he saw that immense, classic building shining above the city in the sky. In splendid and austere whiteness the Capitol rises terrace upon terrace above the trees, its columns, its cornices and its dome blanched in the cold radiance of scores of arc lights hidden among the trees.

Like fireflies attracted to this centre of light, cars moved their sparkling points of brightness down the vivid avenues, and at the vestibule of the Library, which lies in the grounds apart from the Capitol, set down fit denizens for this kingdom of radiance.

Senators and parliamentarians generally are sober entities, but wives and daughters made up for them in colour and in comeliness. In cloth of gold, in brocades, in glowing satin and flashing silk, multi-coloured and ever-shifting, a stream of jewelled vivacity pressed up the severe white marble stairs in the severe white marble hall. There could not have been a better background for such a shining and pulsating mass of living colour. There was no distraction from that warm beauty of moving humanity; the flowers, too, were severe, severe and white; great masses of white chrysanthemums were all that was needed, were all that was there.

And at the head of the staircase a genius in design had made one stroke of colour, one stroke of astounding and poignant scarlet. On this scarlet carpet the Prince in evening dress stood and encountered the tide of guests that came up to him, were received by him, and flowed away from him in a thousand particles and drops of colour, as women, with all the vivacity of their clothes in their manner, and men in uniforms or evening dress, striving to keep pace with them, went drifting through the high, clear purity of the austere corridors.