Perhaps for this very reason, Sumner was the more valuable
acquaintance for a newspaper-man. Adams found him most useful;
perhaps quite the most useful of all these great authorities who
were the stock-in-trade of the newspaper business; the
accumulated capital of a Silurian age. A few months or years
more, and they were gone. In 1868, they were like the town
itself, changing but not changed. La Fayette Square was society.
Within a few hundred yards of Mr. Clark Mills's nursery monument
to the equestrian seat of Andrew Jackson, one found all one's
acquaintance as well as hotels, banks, markets and national
government. Beyond the Square the country began. No rich or
fashionable stranger had yet discovered the town. No literary or
scientific man, no artist, no gentleman without office or
employment, had ever lived there. It was rural, and its society
was primitive. Scarcely a person in it had ever known life in a
great city. Mr. Evarts, Mr. Sam Hooper, of Boston, and perhaps
one or two of the diplomatists had alone mixed in that sort of
world. The happy village was innocent of a club. The one-horse
tram on F Street to the Capitol was ample for traffic. Every
pleasant spring morning at the Pennsylvania Station, society met
to bid good-bye to its friends going off on the single express.
The State Department was lodged in an infant asylum far out on
Fourteenth Street while Mr.
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