garnished; its bare floors echo mournfully to our footfalls; the hall door (the "classic portal, resting on eight massive Doric columns," as the guide-book describes it), stands drearily open; all the world is welcome to enter there. It is not in the least like a haunted house; there are no corners whence bats might flit at night; no thick curtain of dust coats the walls, nor dark banners of spider's web veil the windows. The lofty rooms are spotless, speckless, carefully kept and unutterably forlorn. We wander from room to room through a desolate silence only broken by our own steps; the conservatories are barren of flowers; the only living thing we come upon is a dog sleeping in a patch of sunlight. More mournful a memorial than granite slab or marble cross, more eloquent than inscription carved in stone, the forsaken mansion stands, a silent monument to the Lost Cause.

Well, we have done with

As we descend the great staircase, a mighty clatter and babble wake the hollow echoes, and we meet a gay and rather noisy party, led by our brisk young New Yorker of yesterday's Mount Vernon excursion, swarming, chattering and laughing across the hall. Their happy, ringing voices strike a jarring note here. Arlington Heights, and these joyous ones may ransack the lonely corners of the deserted chambers at their own sweet will. As we turn for a last look, we hear the youngest, liveliest and prettiest of the party exclaim, as she trips lightly into the bare drawing-room:

“Oh, my! here's a room for a hop!"

We drive back to Washington and return to our hotel in

good time for dinner, to which we sit down, a company of some three hundred, round tables loaded with every delicacy of the season, and dine to music, a band playing in the gallery overlooking the dining-room, exhilarating the spirits and stimulating the appetites of the assembled Sybarites by stirring strains.

Assassins may shoot and presidents may fall. After a splashing and a circling in the waves, the current flows on much the same.

"Le roi est mort! Vive le roi !"

ΟΝ

CARPENTERS' HALL

BENSON J. LOSSING

N Monday morning I visited Carpenters' Hall, the building in which the first Continental Congress held its brief session. Having had no intimation concerning its appearance, condition and present use, and informed that it was situated in "Carpenters' Court," imagination had invested its exterior with dignity, its interior with solemn grandeur, and its location a spacious area where nothing "common or unclean" was permitted to dwell. How often the hoof of Pegasus touches the leafless treetops of sober prose when his rider supposes him to be at his highest altitude! How often the rainbow of imagination fades and leaves to the eye nothing but the forbidding aspect of a cloud of plain reality! So at this time. The spacious court was but a short and narrow alley; and the Hall, consecrated by the holiest associations which cluster around the birthplace of our Republic, was a small twostory building, of sombre aspect, with a short steeple and all of a dingy hue.

This building is constructed of small imported bricks, each alternate one glazed, and darker than the other, giving it a checkered appearance. Many of the old houses in Philadelphia were built of like materials. It was originally erected for the hall of meeting for the society of house