Out-door scenes were not much more attractive. The three-months' reign
of Jupiter Pluvius, which has made this spring evilly notorious, had
just begun in earnest. In the main avenues, on either side of the
rail-track of the cars, the mud was a trifle deeper than that of a
cross-lane, in winter, in the Warwickshire clays. To traverse the
by-streets comfortably, you require rather a clever animal over a
country, and especially good in "dirt;" they are intersected by frequent
brooks, much wider and deeper than that celebrated one which tested the
prowess of "_le bonhomme Briggs_." There are rough stepping-stones at
some of the crossings, and the passage of these, after nightfall,
resembles greatly that of a "shaking" bog, where the traveler has to
leap from tussock to moss-hag with agile audacity; the consequences of a
false step being, in both cases, about the same. I began to think,
regretfully of certain rugged continental _paves_ execrated in days gone
by; they, at least, had a firm bottom, more or less remote.
The public buildings of Washington do not attempt architectural display:
with scarcely an exception, they are severely simple and square. But
there is a certain grandeur in the masses of white marble, which is
everywhere lavishly employed, and the Capitol stands right well--alone,
on the crest of a low, abrupt slope, with nothing to intercept the view
from its terraces, seaward, and up the valley of the Potomac.
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