THE INAUGURATION PROCESSION. 277 Now the carnival of salute; the Middies fire their howitzers, thirty-seven guns; the Second Artillery fire twentyone salvos; the Firemen ring the bells of their engines; ten thousand men warm their hands with hat swinging, and make their throats sore with shouting. Amid all, the multitude and the procession surge back towards the Executive Mansion. Between the latter and Lafayette square, the review, the return march, the military pageant culminates. The President, with lady friends, enters the pavilion built for the purpose, and the troops march by, encircling two solid squares; the West Point Cadets appear below Corcoran's building, marching downward, as the magnificent New York Regiment a thousand men-just arrived after an all night's freezing delay, have reached Fifteenth street, marching up. The entire body of soldiery march and mass, till as far as the eyes can reach through the glittering sunshine, one only sees gleaming helmets, flashing bayonets, glancing sabers, the Cadets on double quick, the Middies firing their howitzers, officers displaying fine horses and uniforms, drumm-majors tossing their batons, bands playing, and cannon thundering. Amid all these the four horses dashing before the Presidential barouche, bear the President to the Executive door, which now mercifully shuts them from our sight. CHAPTER XXVIII. THE NEW PRESIDENT-THE INAUGURATION BALL. "'Twas ever How Sixty Thousand Dollars were Spent-Something wrong: UNT NTOLD time, and trouble, and sixty thousand dollars were expended on the last inauguration ball building, and yet there was something the matter with . the inaugural ball. There is always something the matter with every inauguration ball. When I wish to think of a spot especially suggestive of torments, I think of an inauguration ball. There was the one before the last, held in the Treasury Building. The air throughout the entire building was perforated with a fine dust ground till you felt that you were taking in with every breath a myriad homoeopathic doses of des THE CLOTHES OF SIX THOUSAND PEOPLE. 279 iccated grindstone. The agonies of that ball can never be written. There are mortals dead in their grave because of it. There are mortals who still curse, and swear, and sigh at the thought of it. There are diamonds, and pearls, and precious garments that are not to their owners because of it. The scenes in those cloak and hat rooms can never be forgotten by any who witnessed them. The colored messengers, called from their posts in the Treasury to do duty in these rooms, received hats and wraps with perfect facility, and tucked them in loop-holes as it happened. But to give them back, each to its owner, that was impossible. Not half of them could read numbers, and those who could soon grew bewildered, overpowered, ill-tempered and impertinent under the hosts that advanced upon them for cloaks and hats. Picture it! Six or more thousand people clamoring for their clothes! In the end they were all tumbled out 'promiscuous" on the floor. Then came the siege! Few seized their own, but many snatched other people's garments-anything, something, to protect them from the pitiless morning, whose wind came down like the bite of death. Delicate women, too sensitive to take the property of others, crouched in corners, and wept on window ledges; and there the daylight found them. Carriages, also, had fled out of the scourging blast, and the men and women who emerged from the marble halls, with very little to wear, found that they must "foot it" to their habitations. One gentleman walked to Capitol Hill, nearly two miles, in dancing pumps and bare-headed; another performed the same exploit, wrapped in a lady's sontag. Poor Horace Greeley, after expending his wrath on the stairs and cursing Washington anew as a place that should be immediately blotted out of the universe, strode to his hotel hatless. The next day and the next week were consumed by people searching for their lost clothes, and General Chipman says that he still receives letters demanding articles lost at that inauguration ball. Well, our latest brought discomfort, and discomfiture of another sort. Neither money, time nor labor were stinted in this leviathan, that still lifts up its broken and propped up back in Judiciary square. The building was 350 feet long. The ball-room 300 by 100 feet. All this was temporary, built of light boards, lined with lighter muslin. You might as well have attempted to have warmed Pennsylvania avenue as such a place on such a night. Twenty-four hours before the ball the wind-devils went at it. If a host from the pit had received full power to move and dismember it, it could scarcely look more forlorn than it did one Monday morning. They had sat on its spine in one place till it curved in, punched it up in another till it was hunchbacked. They had inflated its sides till they swelled out like an inflated balloon, while the air was black with the tar-rags, scaming its roof, which flying imps were carrying up to high heaven. No less the official report said of the inside: "The mighty American Eagle spreads his wings above the President's platform. He has suspended, from his pinions, streamers one hundred feet in length, caught up on either side by coats of arms. The circumference of this vast design is one hundred and eighty feet. The President's reception platform is sixty feet long, and thirty feet wide. Twelve pilasters support alternate gold-figured, red and blue stands, on which are pots of blooming flowers. The platform and steps are richly carpeted. In the rear of the DANCING IN THE COLD. 281 balcony, are immense festoons of flags, banners, shields, radiating from a huge illuminated star of gas-lights." What were all those white and rosy walls of cambric, to the all-pervading polar wave that froze sailors' fingers, and struck West Point Cadets to the pavements, in congestive chills, at noonday? Why, they were nothing but an immense sieve, to strain that same polar wave through on to the persons of delicate (?) women, who, without money, and without price, for the sake of dubious admiration and commend, in promiscuous assemblies, outvie Lydia Thompson in paucity of attire. But the ball. My intention was to say, that the President was so near frozen in the day-time, he was not suf ficiently thawed out to appear under that spreading eagle, until half-past eleven o'clock, when the north wind swooped in from behind, and he congealed again immediately. The President's platform was at the north end, and all the muslin splendors of the presidential dressing and waiting-room could not, and did not, warm that polar wave. The thousands of canary-birds perched aloft, who were expected to burst into simultaneous song at the sight of him, and to trill innumerable preludes in honor of Miss Nelly, instead, poor wretches, had, one and all, gone to bed, with their toes tucked in their feathers, and their bills buried in their breasts, in dumb effort to keep them from freezing. Not a canary-bird sang. No, they were as paralyzed with cold as the bipeds below. On the presidential platform, the President and Mrs. Grant sat, the central figures. A little in the rear, sat Mrs. Fish-stately, lovely, and serene as ever; and just behind her, the Secretary of State. Next, were Mrs. Boutwell and Miss Boutwell, and the Secretary of the |