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Show imATMNl'Sll. The GKiiug Honrs in the Legislative Fall are Full of Excitement and Animation. 17 flNQ TO CROWD BILLS THROUGH ' Breezy Letter on the Dtai Congreei from the Verratile Pen of Walter Wal-ter Wellman. Washington. March 23. Special Bnrrespondence Times No other days In the career if a congress are so full tn : excitement anil turmoil us the closing ones. They are day of struggle, of baste, of effort, of hope and fenr, of success suc-cess iiml despair. It is one of the traditions tra-ditions of the Capitol that the dual hours apt thy nice iu which to lip a little hie desk. Old Utters, more precious than tho average rim of coinmunica-tions, coinmunica-tions, and therefore long preserved ' each with a story of its own; newspaper newspa-per clippings, perhaps tales of triumph in convention or at polls; documents, memoranda, reports, bills, even a few photographs pasted to the lid of the tchool-liko desk all must Ut removed. Header, did yon ever clear out a desk at which you had long worked, nnd make ready to turn it over to another, to your successor? If so, you can sympathize with this statesman, who finds that ho is leaving life and hope ami soul behind in the ink stained, dingy old desk. You can understand why his hand trembles, and there is a tremor in his voice and a tear in his eye. Twelve years he has walked at that desk. It has lieon tho scene of his struggles and triumphs, the post at which he has battled, not without with-out success, for fame. And now his constituents have rejected him, and a new man is coming to take his place. Men are rushing to and fro between the two ends of tho Capitol in these doe-ins doe-ins hours. The cleric of tho house trot to the senate to announce tho passage of another bill, the appointment of another an-other committee of conference or a disagreement dis-agreement to amendments. The secretary secre-tary of the senate runs to the house on a eimilur errand. Not H minute is to bo lost. Every second is precious. Every one is in a hurry. Senators are elbow-intf elbow-intf their way through tho crowds in the rotunda or corridors, hastening without much regard to dignity to give their representatives pointers about a bill which is to be saved from tho wreck if effort and ingenuity will save it. Representatives knock people over la the echo room or statuary hall in their mad rush toward the renate, where senator? sen-ator? art) to be appealed to in behalf of this measure or that. Even the phlegmatic phleg-matic Capitol policemen become infected with the fever of the movement, and expectorate ex-pectorate three times a minute, whereas in normal times they exis-ctorate but once. This is t'neonly change noticeable in these worthy oiticials, for in all my experience I never heard of a Capitol policeman po-liceman indulging iu any more excitiujf or fatiguing activity than that of expectoration. ex-pectoration. The hours pass rapidly, too rapidly to suit the thousands of persons whose hopes are bound Tip iu what may yet be accomplished. There are many anxious glances at the clock, and finally, the hands standing almost perpendicular and nearly parallel, old Father Time himself Capt. Basset t mounts a chair and turns back the hand of the senate clod: so that it shall not yet mark high lioon of March 4, and thereby seal the I I. L i l LAST rllANCE FOR THAT I.1TTI.K niLI. ; "job" through congress, but the rule must be more honored in the breach than in the observance, fur it is a rare thing for any legislation out of the common com-mon run to lie enacted during the last days. Everybody is mi the alert at such times; idl tlie watch dogs are scanning the legislative horizon, tars pricked up and eyes wide open. There is such a struggle for place or preference, such n (ighl between measures meas-ures which are forced to be rivals forthe simple reason that only one of fifty of them can b.i considered, that the man who has a bill of doubtful honesty or iieof illness may as well let it lie buried among the thousands of other dead and living bills on the calendar. What a Mm graveyard of hopes thb calendar is! A i book of ninety or one hundred broad pages, all classified and indexed,- printed print-ed in tho highest style of the art preservative pre-servative and containing what? A list of the bills on the calendar of the house bills unconsidered, bills nn-debated, nn-debated, bills unknown, bills that sleep , the Bleep of death. There are thousands of them, little and big. In vain do the 1 " members fill the space in front of tha " chair and Hhoiit, "Mr. Speaker! Mr. ' ' ' Speaker!" Fifty men crack their voices, grow red iu the face, flaunt their bills excitedly in tho air, as if they wished their arms wcro long enough so their pet measures might bo thrust literally Into the speaker's face. But many call nnd few are chosen. It is not the man with the loudest voice or the longest arms who is first seen by the speaker. Hero is an occasimi on which it behooves one to bo on good terms with tho presiding officer, lest lie be overlooked by that gentleman's eagle 1 eye. Shout and yell and dance and throw your limbs about as much as you please, all will be ?i vain unless you are I on the speaker's little list. If you have i been omitted from the magic roll, he ; will not hear yon though you bellow at him with a cannon's voice; nor will he seo you if you swell np ten times your fciiual size and dance a ghost dance , somewhere between the floor and the ceiling for ahalf hour. j It is sometimes a great thing to lie a j speaker. There is genuine power iu it j But the man who docs not want to be ; prowled at, cursed, flayed by friend and ; foe, should leave to others tho task of , presiding over a house during the closing lays of a session. How they do growl st Mr. Reed friend and foe alike! "How can I go homo and face that widow whose pension bill I promised to pass?" "If Reed had only looked mo in the eye and called my name I could j have passed the public building bill for j my town, and that would have re-elected I me." So they go. They always do. 1 Everybody seems to take satisfaction in Sawing the speaker, just as satisfaction has been taken every other March 4 for a hundred years or more. But there is ono thing concerning the big speaker, who has so long been conspicuous con-spicuous in the public eye, that all these t'NC'Lt! SAM MAKKS HIS THl'NKS. fate of this congress. The old captain, who has been nearly sixty years in tho senate chamber, is rather proud of the fact that ho was the first man thus to lengthen the legislative day. It was in 1814, and the senate was sitting sit-ting iu the old chamber, now used by the supreme court; an appropriation bill was about to fail of passage for lack of time, when sonio one suggested to the president pro tempore, Senator Maiy;um, of North Carolina, that the official day might be prolonged by manipulation of the hands of the clock. He gave instructions in-structions to Capt. Bassett, and a precedent prece-dent was thus set which will probably be followed as long as congress exists. Capt. Bassett claims ho never moves the hands back more than ten minutes at a time, and fifteen minutes of filched time is usually sufficient; but in the last congress con-gress he admits adding twenty-seven minutes to tho official life of that body. Finally the gavel falls for tho last time. Tho Fifty-first congress is dead. Men who have fought each other like wild beasts now shako hands and wish luck. More desks are being cleared out. Tho sergeants-at-aruis aro settling up accounts. ac-counts. Pages aro hanging near by senators and representatives, expecting farewell tips. Down in tho committee rooms statesmen, who now write that sad prefix "ex" with their mimes, are packing with documents, books, letters, perhaps personal effects and an occasional occa-sional jug or demijohn, the trunks which Uncle Sam has been good enough to present to his departing servants freo of cost. Each retiring statesman gets three trunks, but those of the senators are better bet-ter made thsn those re-'ed by representatives, representa-tives, having brass binges and sweet-wood sweet-wood linings. All these trunks or packing pack-ing boxes aro made in the cabiuet shops in the basement of the Capitol, and with 187 of hi? servants goiog away, and three trunks for each, it is a wholesale business busi-ness in trunks Uncle Sam has been doing do-ing of late. Walter Wellman. j CLF.AKINd OUT HIS DESK. ! members of congress, Democrats and Republicans, agree to. They agree that Mr. Reed is the greatest living debater. de-bater. There is no one else in the house, no one in the senate that is equal to him m the return-fire, charge, assault, rout and recover tactics of modern legisla- ; live warfare. When another congress comes we shall have this peerless debater ; sti the floor agaiu; and how the sparks will fly! While the whirl and roar of the dos- ; tig hours fill the great hall of the house, i -jr tho more scdalo chamber of tho sen- j ure, some sad scenes are being enacted ' right under our eyes. You do not see them? That is Vocalise your eye is not sympathetic. Watch tho gray haired : man where 1 point. IIo is clearing out ' |