LITMIR.BIZ

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and beyond is Georgetown, with its noted University, founded by the Jesuits in 1789, and having about seven hundred students. In the Oak Hill Cemetery, at Georgetown, is the grave of John Howard Payne, the author of "Home, Sweet Home," who died in 1852. Far away over the Potomac, in the Arlington National Cemetery, are the graves of Generals Sherman and Sheridan.

      Down near the Potomac, on the Mall, to the westward of the Smithsonian turrets, is the extensive brick and brownstone building representing the dominant industry of the United States, which gives the politicians so much anxiety in catering for votes—the Agricultural Department. Here are spacious gardens and greenhouses, an arboretum and herbarium, the adjacent buildings also containing an agricultural museum. As over three-fifths of the men in the United States are farmers and farm-workers, and many others are in the adjunct industries, it has become a popular saying in Washington that if you wish to scare Congress you need only shake a cow's tail at it. This department has grown into an enormous distributing office for seeds and cuttings, crop reports and farming information. Among its curiosities is the "Sequoia Tree Tower," formed of a section of a Sequoia or Big Tree of California, which was three hundred feet high and twenty-six feet in diameter at the base.

      Behind the Agricultural Department, and rising almost at the river bank, and in front of the Executive Mansion, is the noted Washington Monument, its pointed apex elevated five hundred and fifty-five feet. This is a square and gradually tapering shaft, constructed of white Maryland marble, the walls fifteen feet thick at the base and eighteen inches at the top, the pyramidal apex being fifty-five feet high and capped with a piece of aluminum. Its construction was begun in 1848, abandoned in 1855, resumed in 1877 and finished in 1884, at a total cost of $1,300,000. The lower walls contain stones contributed by public corporations and organizations, many being sent by States and foreign nations, and bearing suitable inscriptions in memory of Washington. A fatiguing stairway of nine hundred steps leads to the top, and there is also a slow-moving elevator. From the little square windows, just below the apex, there is a grand view over the surrounding country. Afar off to the northwest is seen the long hazy wall of the Blue Ridge or Kittatinny Mountain range, its prominent peak, the Sugar Loaf, being fifty miles distant. To the eastward is the Capitol and its surmounting dome, over a mile away, while the city spreads all around the view below, like a toy town, its streets crossing as on a chess-board, and cut into gores and triangles by the broad, diagonal avenues lined with trees, the houses being interspersed with many foliage-covered spaces. Coming from the northwest the Potomac passes nearly at the foot of the monument, with Arlington Heights over on the distant Virginia shore, and the broad river channel flowing away to the southwest until lost among the winding forest-clad shores below Alexandria. From this elevated perch can be got an excellent idea of the peculiarities of the town, its vast plan and long intervals of space, so that there is quite plainly shown why the practical Yankee race calls it the "City of Magnificent Distances." Possibly one of the best descriptions of Washington and its characteristics is that of the poet in the Washington Post:

      A city well named of magnificent distances;

      Of boulevards, palaces, fountains and trees;

      Of sunshine and moonlight whose subtle insistence is—

      "Bask in our radiance! Be lulled by our breeze!"

      A city like Athens set down in Arcadia;

      White temples and porticoes gleaming 'mid groves;

      Where nymphs glide and smile as though quite unafraid o' you,

      The home of the Muses, the Graces, the Loves;

      The centre of Politics, Letters and Sciences;

      Elysium of Arts, yet the Lobbyist's Dream;

      Where gather the clans whose only reliance is

      Gold and the dross that sweeps down with its stream;

      An isle of the lotus, where every-day business

      Sails on its course all unvexed by simoons;

      No bustle or roar, no mad-whirling dizziness

      O'er velvety streets like Venetian lagoons;

      A town where from nothing whatever they bar women,

      From riding a bicycle—tending a bar;

      Ex-cooks queen society—ladies are charwomen—

      For such the plain facts as too often they are.

      A city where applicants, moody, disconsolate,

      Swoop eager for office and senseless to shame;

      The "heeler" quite certain of getting his consulate,

      Although, to be sure, he can't sign his name;

      A town where all types of humanity congregate;

      The millionaire lolling on cushions of ease;

      The tramp loping by at a wolfish and hungry gait;

      And mankind in general a' go as you please.

      A city in short of most strange inconsistencies;

      Condensing the history of man since the fall;

      A city, however, whose piece de resistance is

      This—'tis the best and the fairest of all.

      THE POTOMAC AND THE ALLEGHENIES.

      The Potomac is one of the chief among the many rivers draining the Allegheny Mountains. It originates in two branches, rising in West Virginia and uniting northwest of Cumberland; is nearly four hundred miles long; has remarkably picturesque scenery in the magnificent gorges and reaches of its upper waters; breaks through range after range of the Alleghenies, and after reaching the lowlands becomes a tidal estuary for a hundred miles of its final course, broadening to six and eight and ultimately sixteen miles wide at its mouth in the Chesapeake. Washington is near the head of tidewater, one hundred and twenty-five miles from the bay; and for almost its entire course the Potomac is an interstate boundary, between Maryland and West Virginia and Virginia. Its name is Indian, referring to its use in their primitive navigation, the original word "Petomok" meaning "they are coming by water"—"they draw near in canoes." The Alleghenies, where this noted river originates, are a remarkable geological formation. The Atlantic Coast of the United States has a general trend from the northeast to the southwest, with bordering sand beaches, and back of them a broad band of pines. Then, towards the northwest, the land gradually rises, being formed in successive ridges, with intervening valleys, until it reaches the Alleghenies. The great ranges of this mountain chain, which is geologically known as the Appalachian System, run almost parallel to the coast for over a thousand miles, from the White Mountains of New Hampshire down to Alabama. They are noted mountains, not very high, but of remarkable construction, and are said to be much older in geological formation than the Alps or the Andes. They are composed of series of parallel ridges, one beyond the other, and all following the same general course, like the successive waves of the ocean. For long distances these ridges run in perfectly straight lines, and then, as one may curve around into a new direction, all the others curve with it. The intervening valleys are as remarkable in their parallelism as the ridges enclosing them. From the seaboard to the mountains the ranges of hills are of the same general character, but with less elevation, gentler slopes, and in most cases narrower and much more fertile valleys.

      The South Mountain, an irregular and in some parts broken-down ridge, is the outpost of the Alleghenies, while the great Blue Ridge is their eastern buttress. The latter is about twenty miles northwest of the South Mountain, and is the famous Kittatinny range, named by the Indians, and in their figurative language meaning "the endless chain of hills." It stretches from the Catskills in New York southwest to Alabama, a distance of eight hundred miles, a veritable backbone for the Atlantic seaboard, its rounded ridgy peaks rising sometimes twenty-five hundred feet north of the Carolinas, and much higher in those States. It stands up like a great blue wall against the northwestern horizon, deeply notched where the rivers flow out, and is the eastern border for the mountain chain of numerous parallel ridges of varying heights and characteristics that stretch in rows behind it, covering a width of a hundred miles or more. Within this chain is the vast store of minerals that has done so much to create American wealth—the coal and

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