A stranger in Washington, looking down the wide outer avenue named "Massachusetts," which goes bowling from knoll to knoll and disappears in the unknown hills of the east, has no notion that it leads anywhere, and gives up the conundrum. On the contrary, it points straight to the Washington Asylum, better known as the District Poor-House, an institution to become hereafter conspicuous to every tourist who shall prefer the Baltimore and Potomac to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad; for the new line crosses the Eastern Branch by a pile-bridge nearly in the rear of the poor-house, and let us hope that when the whistle, like

the dreary banks and bluffs of the Eastern Branch will show more frequent signs of habitation and visitation.

To visit the poor-house one must have a "permit" from the mayor, physician, or a poor commissioner. Provided with this, he will follow out Pennsylvania Avenue over Capitol Hill, until nearly at the brink of the Anacostia or Eastern Branch, when by the oblique avenue called "Georgia" he will pass to his right the Congressional burying-ground, and arriving at the powder magazine in front, draw up at the almshouse gate, a mile and a quarter from the palace of Congress.

It is a smart brick building, four stories high, with green trimmings, standing on the last promontory of some grassy commons beloved of geese and billygoats. The short, black cedars, which appear to be a species of vegetable crape, give a stubby look of grief to the region round the poor-house, and, thickest at the Congressional Cemetery, screen from the paupers the view of the city. Across the plains, once made populous by army hospitals, few objects move except funeral processions, creeping toward the graveyard or receding at a merry gait, and occasional pensioners, out on leave, coming home dutifully to their bed of charity. The report of some sportsman's gun, where he is rowing in the marshes of the gray river, sometimes raises echoes in the high hills and ravines of the other shore, where, many years ago, the rifles of Graves and Cilley were heard by every partisan in the land. Now the tall forts, raised in the war, are silent and deserted; the few villas and farm-houses look from their background of pine upon the smart edifice on the city shore, and its circle of hospitals nearer the water, and its small-pox hospital a little removed, and upon the dead-house and the Potter's Field at the river brink. We all know the melancholy landscape of a poor-house.

The Potter's Field preceded the poor-house on this site by many years. The almshouse was formerly erected on M Street, between Sixth and Seventh, and, being removed here, it burned to the ground in the month of March, fourteen years ago, when the present brick structure was raised. The entire premises, of which the main part is the almshouse garden, occupy less than fifty acres, and the number of inmates is less than two hundred, the females preponderating in the proportion of three to one. Under the same roof are the almshouse and the work-house, the inmates of the former being styled "Infirmants," and of the latter "Penitents." The government of the institution is vested in three commissioners, to whom is responsible the intendent, Mr. Joseph F. Hodgson, a very cheerful and practical-looking "Bumble."

Every Wednesday the three commissioners meet at this almshouse and receive the weekly reports of the intendent, physician, and gardener. Once every year these officers, and the matron, wagoner, and baker are elected. Sixteen ounces of bread and eight ounces of beef are the ration of the district pauper. The turnkey, gate-keeper, chief watchmen, and chief nurses, are selected from the inmates. The gates are closed at sunset, and the lights go out at eight P.M. all winter. The inmates wear a uniform, labelled in large letters "Work-house," or "Washington Asylum."

The poor-house is an institution coeval with the capital. We are told that while crabbed old Davy Burns, the owner of the most valuable part of the site of Washington City, was haggling with General Washington over his proportion of lots, his neglected and intemperate brother, Tommy, was an inmate of the poor-house.

Thus, while the Romulus of the place married his daughter to a Congressman, and was buried in a "mausoleum" on H Street, Remus died without the walls and mingled his ashes, perhaps, with paupers.

The vaunted metropolis of the republican hopes of mankind—for such was Washington, the fabulous city, advertised and praised in every capital of Western Europe—drew to its site artists, adventurers, and speculators from all lands. From Thomas Law, a secretary of Warren Hastings, who wasted the earnings of India on enterprises here, to a Frenchman who died on the guillotine for practising with an infernal machine upon the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, the long train of pilgrims came and saw and despaired, and many of them, perhaps, lie in the Potter's Field. Old books and newspapers, chary on such personal questions, contain occasional references as to some sculptor's suicide, or to the straits of this or that French officer, a claimant about Congress; and we know that Major L'Enfant, who conceived the plan of the place, sought refuge with a pitying friend and died here penniless. The long war of twenty years in Europe brought to America thousands in search of safety and rest, and to these the magnetism of the word "capital" was often the song of the siren wiling them to the poor-house. By the time Europe had wearied of the sword, the fatality attending high living, large slave-tilled estates, the love of official society, and the defective education of the young men of tide-water Virginia and Maryland, produced a new class of native-born errants and broken profligates at Washington, and many a life whose memories began with a coach-and-four and a park of deer ended them between the coverlets of a poor-house bed. The old times were, after all, very hollow times! We are fond of reading about the hospitality of the Madisonian age, but could so many have accepted it if all were prosperous?

In our time, work being the fate and the redemption of us all, the District Almshouse contains few government employÉs. Now and then, as Mr. Hodgson told us, some clerk, spent with sickness or exhausted by evil indulgences, takes the inevitable road across the vacant plains and eats his pauper ration in silence or in resignation; but the age is better, not, perhaps, because the heart of man is changed, but in that society is organized upon truer principles of honor, of manfulness, and of labor. The class of well-bred young men who are ashamed to admit that they must earn their living, and who affect the company of gamesters and chicken-fighters, has some remnants left among us, but they find no aliment in the public sentiment, and hear no response in the public tone. Duelling is over; visiting one's relatives as a profession is done; thrift is no more a reproach, and even the reputation of being a miser is rather complimentary to a man. The worst chapters of humanity in America are those narrating the indigence of the old agricultural families on the streams of the Chesapeake; the quarterly sale of a slave to supply the demands of a false understanding of generosity; the inhuman revelling of one's friends upon the last possessions of his family, holding it to be a jest to precipitate his ruin; the wild orgies held on the glebe of some old parish church, horses hitched to the gravestones, and punch mixed in the baptismal font; and at the last, delirium, impotence, decay! Let those who would understand it read Bishop Meade, or descend the Potomac and Rappahannock, even at this day, and cross certain thresholds.

The Washington poor-house seems to be well-arranged, except in one respect: under the same roof, divided only by a partition and a corridor, the vicious are lodged for punishment and the unfortunate for refuge.

We passed through a part of the building where, among old, toothless women, semi-imbecile girls—the relicts of error, the heirs of affliction—three babies of one mother were in charge of a strong, rosy Irish nurse. Two of them, twins, were in her lap, and a third upon the floor halloaing for joy. Such noble specimens of childhood we had never seen; heads like CÆsar's, eyes bright as the depths of wells into which one laughs and receives his laughter back, and the complexions and carriage of high birth. The woman was suckling them all, and all crowed alternately, so that they made the bare floors and walls light up as with pictures. A few yards off, though out of hearing, were the thick forms of criminals, drunkards, wantons, and vagrants, seen through the iron bars of their wicket, raising the croon and song of an idle din, drumming on the floor, or moving to and fro restlessly. Beneath this part of the almshouse were cells where bad cases were locked up. The association of the poor and the wicked affected us painfully.

Strolling into the syphilitic wards, where, in the awful contemplation of their daily, piecemeal decay, the silent victims were stretched all day upon their cots; among the idiotic and the crazed; into the apartments of the aged poor, seeing, let us hope, blessed visions of life beyond these shambles; and drinking in, as we walked, the solemn but needful lesson of our own possibilities and the mutations of our nature, we stood at last among the graves of the almshouse dead—those who have escaped the dissecting-knife. Scattered about, with little stones and mounds here and there, under the occasional sullen green of cedars, a dead-cart and a spade sticking up as symbols, and the neglected river, deserted as the Styx, plashing against the low banks, we felt the sobering melancholy of the spot and made the prayer of "Give me neither poverty nor riches!"

1871.