celebration-by a public execution. This appeal elicited no response, and the meeting broke up.

With this fiasco the last hope was gone, and the unhappy prisoner made up his mind that the end was come. Every precaution had been taken to hinder him from committing suicide; but, by some means or other, he procured cigars loaded with strychnine, and attempted to kill himself by smoking them: the poison, however, did not act rapidly enough, and he was unable to conceal his agony. Remedies were applied, but towards morning his strength began to fail. The execution had been fixed, by his own wish, for two o'clock, but it was feared he would not live till then; and, in obedience to their duty, the authorities of the gaol had him executed in the courtyard of the Tombs Prison, at noon. Very few persons were present: and when I passed the prison an hour afterwards, there was no sign of excitement, except the collection of a small crowd of Irish, who were waiting to see the body carried out.

The story is a painful one, and the circumstances of the execution still more so. Horrible as the man's crime was, it is impossible to feel pity for him yet, the fact that a slave-trader was hung in New York, the headquarters of the American Slave-trade, and hung amidst the approbation of the public, was a gain not only to America, but to the world at large.

WASHINGTON.

It was with an odd sensation of being for the first time in a strange society, of dwelling in a slave-owning city, that I became acquainted with the metropolis of the United States.

To a stranger, Washington must be a quaint residence, even in ordinary days. Had it progressed at the rate of ordinary Northern cities, it would have been by this time one of the finest capitals of the world; as it is, it was built for a city of the future, and the future has not yet been realized. It is still, as it was once called, the city of magnificent distances. On two low hills, a couple of miles apart, stand the white marble palaces of the Houses of Congress and the Government Offices. At their feet stretches the grand Potomac, just too far off to be visible as a feature in the town; and across the low, broken, marshy valley between them runs the long, broad, irregular Pennsylvania Avenue, a secondhand Broadway out at elbows. On either side hosts of smaller streets branch out for short distances, ending

abruptly in brick-fields or in the open country; and that is all. If the plan of the city had ever been carried out, the Capitol would have been the centre of a vast polygon, with streets branching out from it in every direction. But owing to a characteristic quarrel between the Government and a private landowner, which could never have occurred except in an Anglo-Saxon country, the plan was abandoned; the city sprawled out on one side only of the intended polygon, and left the Capitol stranded, so to speak, at the extremity of the town. So Washington has not the one merit of American architecture-symmetry. The whole place looks run up in a night, like the cardboard cities which Potemkin erected to gratify the eyes of his imperial mistress on her tour through Russia; and it is impossible to remove the impression that, when Congress is over, the whole place is taken down, and packed up again till wanted. Everything has such an unfinished "here for the day only" air about it. Everybody is a bird of passage at Washington. The diplomatic corps is transitory by its very nature. The senators, representatives, and ministers, reside there for two, four, possibly six sessions, as the case may be; and the fact of their being in Congress or in office now is rather a presumption than otherwise, that they will not be so again when their term expires. The clerks, officials, and government employés are all, too, mere lodgers. The force of necessity compels each Administration to reappoint a few

of the subordinate clerks who understand the business of the office; but still, every official may be turned out in four years at the longest, and most of them know that they probably will be dismissed at the end of that period. There are no commercial or manufacturing interests to induce merchants or capitalists to settle here. The growth of Baltimore, and the filling-up of the Potomac, have destroyed what small prospect of commercial greatness Washington may ever have indulged in. There is nothing attractive about the place to make any one, not brought there by business, fix on it as a place of residence. With the exception of a few landowners who have estates in the neighbourhood, a score of lawyers connected with the Supreme Court, and a host of petty tradesmen and lodging-house keepers, there is nobody who looks on Washington as his home.

Hence nobody, with rare exceptions, has a house of his own there. Most of the members of Congress live in hotels or furnished lodgings. The wives and families of the married members (whose names are marked in the Congressional Directory, with a row of crosses corresponding to the number of womankind they bring with them) come to Washington for a few months or weeks during the session, and for the time of their stay a furnished house is taken. In consequence, there is no style about the mode of living. The number of private carriages is very few; and people are afraid of bringing good horses to be ruined by the rut tracks (for they are

Public amusements
There is a theatre

not worthy of the name of roads) which serve the purposes of streets in Washington. of any kind are scanty and poor. about equal in size and merit to those of Margate or Scarborough in the season; at the Smithsonian Institute (the barbarity of whose designation I am afraid is due to its English benefactor) there are frequent lectures, which, when they are not political demonstrations, are about as interesting, or uninteresting, as lectures on the Glaciers and the Tertiary Formation, et hoc genus omne, are at home; and there are occasional concerts, dramatic readings, and pictorial exhibitions. But this, with the visit of an occasional circus, is all.

The city, in fact, is an overgrown watering-place. The roads appear to have been marked out and then left uncompleted, and the pigs you see grubbing in the main thoroughfares seem in keeping with the place. The broken-down ramshackle hackney-coaches (or hacks, as they are called), with their shabby negro drivers, are obviously brought out for the day, to last for the day only; the shops are of the stock Margate watering-place stamp, where nothing is kept in stock, and where what little there is is all displayed in the shop-windows. The private houses, handsome enough in themselves, are apparently stuck up anywhere the owner liked to build them, just as a travelling-van is perched on the first convenient spot that can be found for a night's lodging. The grand hotels, too, which form a striking, if not an