Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 39, January, 1861 | Page 3

long in finding out. The
oldest inhabitants are here to-day and gone tomorrow, as punctually, if
not as poetically, as the Arabs of Mr. Longfellow. A few
remain,--parasitic growths, clinging tenaciously to the old haunts. Like
tartar on the teeth, they are proof against the hardest rubs of the
tooth-brush of Fortune.
As with the people, so with the houses. Though they retain their
positions, seldom abandoning the ground on which they were originally
built, they change almost hourly their appearance and their
uses,--insomuch that the very solids of the city seem fluid, and even the
stables are mutable,--the horse-house of last week being an office for
the sale of patents, or periodicals, or lottery-tickets, this week, with
every probability of becoming an oyster-cellar, a billiard-saloon, a
cigar-store, a barber's shop, a bar-room, or a faro-bank, next week. And
here is another astonishment. You will observe that the palatial
museums for the temporary preservation of fossil or fungous penmen
join walls, virtually, with habitations whose architecture would reflect
no credit on the most curious hamlet in tide-water Virginia. To your
amazement, you learn that all these houses, thousands in number, are
boarding-houses. Of course, where everybody is a stranger, nobody
keeps house. It would be pardonable to suppose, that, out of so many
boarding-houses, some would be in reality what they are in name.
Nothing can be farther from the fact. These houses contain apartments

more or less cheerless and badly furnished, according to the price
(always exorbitant, however small it may be) demanded for them, and
are devoted exclusively to the storage of empty bottles and demijohns,
to large boxes of vegetable- and flower-seeds, to great piles of books,
speeches, and documents not yet directed to people who will never read
them, and to an abominable odor of boiling cabbages. This odor steals
in from a number of pitch-dark tunnels and shafts, misnamed passages
and staircases, in which there are more books, documents, and speeches,
other boxes of seeds, and a still stronger odor of cabbages. The piles of
books are traps set here for the benefit of the setters of broken legs and
the patchers of skinless shins, and the noisome odors are propagated for
the advantage of gentlemen who treat diseases of the larynx and lungs.
It would appear, then, that the so-called boarding-houses are, in point
of fact, private gift-book stores, or rather, commission-houses for the
receiving and forwarding of a profusion of undesirable documents and
vegetations. You may view them also in the light of establishments for
the manufacture and distribution of domestic perfumery, payment for
which is never exacted at the moment of its involuntary purchase, but is
left to be collected by a doctor,--who calls upon you during the winter,
levies on you with a lancet, and distrains upon your viscera with a
compound cathartic pill.
It is claimed, that, in addition to the victims who pay egregious rents
for boarding-house beds in order that they may have a place to store
their documents and demi-johns, there are other permanent occupants
of these houses. As, for example, Irish chambermaids, who subtract a
few moments from the morning half-hour given to drinking the
remnants of your whiskey, and devote them to cleaning up your room.
Also a very strange being, peculiar to Washington boarding-houses,
who is never visible at any time, and is only heard stumbling up-stairs
about four o'clock in the morning. Also beldames of incalculable
antiquity,--a regular allowance of one to each boarding-house,--who flit
noiselessly and unceasingly about the passages and up and down the
stairways, admonishing you of their presence by a ghostly sniffle,
which always frightens you, and prevents you from running into them
and knocking them down. For these people, it is believed, a table is set
in the houses where the boarders proper flatter their acquaintances that
they sleep. It must be so, for the entire male population is constantly

eating in the oyster-cellars. Indeed, if ocular evidence may be relied on,
the best energies of the metropolis are given to the incessant
consumption of "half a dozen raw," or "four fried and a glass of ale."
The bar-rooms and eating-houses are always full or in the act of
becoming full. By a fatality so unerring that it has ceased to be
wonderful, it happens that you can never enter a Washington restaurant
and find it partially empty, without being instantly followed by a dozen
or two of bipeds as hungry and thirsty as yourself, who crowd up to the
bar and destroy half the comfort you derive from your lunch or your
toddy.
But, although, everybody is forever eating oysters and drinking ale in
myriads of subterranean holes and corners, nobody fails to eat at other
places more surprising and original than any you have yet seen. In all