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white and gold French furniture, and the Colonial dining-room affords a pretty contrast to the remainder of the house.

To many persons Secretary of State Hay is the most interesting American in public, or at least in official life, and probably, therefore, it is not ill fitting that his home should be, from many considerations, the most interesting in Washington. The Hay home is a large roomy structure of red brick at the corner of Sixteenth and H streets, and a glimpse of its interior does not make the report that it cost more than $1,000,000 difficult of belief.

In its plan to the minutest detail, and in its furnishings, the house bears everywhere the indelible impress of the intelligence, care, and discrimination of the statesman,

meeting everybody worth meeting, and his Washington home has been made the receptacle of a great accumulation of souvenirs and mementos of these journeyings, selected with a care such as only a nature like Col. Hay's could exercise.

If the Secretary of State may be said to have a hobby in his home it is mantelpieces. Hardly a room has been unprovided, and artistic taste has found expression in a variety of mediums from onyx to Irish marble. In the Turkish room are the most beautiful examples imaginable of the rug-maker's art. Almost all of the rugs were made to order, and single specimens are valued as high as $15,000 or $20,000,- so valuable, indeed, that connoisseurs who have visited Col. Hay's home have, half laughingly, half mourn

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light. The walls and ceiling of the diningroom are of solid mahogany, and the draperies and tapestries in the mansion are among the finest in America. As might be imagined, the library is a spot very near to the heart of the author of "Jim Bludsoe," and indeed, with its mahogany finish, silk draperies, and secluded cosy corners, it is difficult to understand how it could fail to hold a warm place in the affections even of a transient visitor. The music-room, with its handsome inlaid piano, is another

Avenue for which the Cabinet officer pays a yearly rental not far short of $10,000. The drawing-room at the Gage home is pretty well occupied with handsome examples of sculpture; and the dining-room, with a decoration in carved oak, is thoroughly ideal of what such an apartment should be.

Several of the Cabinet officers, as is the case during every administration, have not established homes at the capital. Secretary Alger has a house which is

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lowed by Lord Lyons, the British ambassador, who was host there preceding the interval of twenty-five years during which it was the home of William W. Corcoran, the millionaire philanthropist who gave Washington its beautiful art gallery. Later the entertainments which Senator and Mrs. Calvin Brice there tendered to their friends were the talk of the capital, and now Miss Paulding, the niece of the famous after-dinner speaker, presides as mistress of the historic mansion. The frescoing throughout the entire house would not fail to attract attention under any circumstances, but from the standpoint of novelty probably the most noteworthy feature of the mansion is the dining-room. It is a huge apartment with carved walls and ceiling, which are in a way suggestive of both Moorish architecture and the stalactites which hang from the roof of a cave.

Senator McMillan, of Michigan, has surrounded himself with pictures and cabinets filled with rare bric-a-brac, not to mention countless pieces of exquisitely

decorated china which seem to hold a potent fascination for feminine visitors. Nor do the mansions enumerated by any means exhaust the list of those whose furnishings and decoration betoken that indulgence of artistic tastes for which, as a rule, opportunities must be created. Senators Elkins and Davis are among the other possessors of houses whose contents are exceptional in several ways.

The one characteristic of these handsome Washington homes whose existence seems to be universal is the evidence of thought and care in the arrangement of little details, whether they be designed to add to the comfort of the visitor or simply to please the eye. It is the undisguisable stamp of tact and culture, and it would be as absurd to ignore its existence as to argue that the achievement of house-furnishing in upper Washington life is the accomplishment of money unaided by opportunities that come only from travel and research.

WALDON FAWCETT.

CLEVELAND, OHIO. [The illustrations used in this article are from photographs by the Clinedinst Studio, Washington, D.C.]

WHAT IT IS, HOW IT IS OBTAINED,, AND THE GREAT POSSIBILITIES

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CLAIMED FOR IT

O STARTLING are some of the recent announcements in relation to liquid air, and so extravagant the claims of its friends, that thinking people are asking what it is. If liquid air is to take the place of steam as the motive power of the world, of gunpowder in the navies of the nations, of dynamite in engineering, of ice in refrigerating, and to do many more wonderful things, we want to know what it is.

Liquid air is just what its name implies. It is not a liquid distilled from some newly discovered vegetable or mineral, but is simply air, such as we breathe, made so cold that it takes the form of water. The fact that air can assume that form is a recent discovery, as is also the method of obtaining the intense cold necessary to this result. The temperature required is 312 degrees below zero,- a temperature farther below the coldest arctic winter than that is below a tropical summer. Yet persistent efforts have at last developed a method by which it is readily produced. When air is cooled down to this degree it changes to a misty vapor and gradually forms into drops that fall like rain to the bottom of the vessel containing it. By a proper arrangement it may then be drawn off into an open receptacle, ready for use.

When seen in an open vessel it might be mistaken for boiling water, as it simmers and gives off a white vapor. When first poured out it boils violently, throwing off a cloud of vapor that rolls down the sides of the vessel. But as soon as the receptacle has cooled to the temperature of the liquid it quiets down to a simmer, which continues until all has evaporated and returned to air. This may require several hours if care is taken to keep the vessel away from every conductor of heat. But if it be placed on a plate of iron, or even a block of ice, it will boil violently and very soon mingle with its native air. If poured out on a conductor, as iron or ice, it will assume the gaseous state so rapidly as to amount to an explosion.

As a freezing agent the power of liquid

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air is terrific. It freezes pure alcohol very readily, and freezes mercury so hard that it may be used as a hammer to drive nails into hard wood; and so thorough is the chill given that the mercury retains the solid state for several minutes. It will sear living flesh like a red-hot iron, and may take the place of all chemical cauterizing in surgery. As a refrigerator, liquid air will be easily controlled, and it can be made to lower the temperature of a room very slightly or to produce a degree of cold that no life could endure for a minute. As an explosive it has certainly great power, and experiments already made indicate that it may be used in both gunnery and blasting; and it may thus take the place of both gunpowder and dynamite. But this will not be discussed in the present article.

As has been already stated, air, when reduced to a very low temperature, condenses and becomes a liquid. But the cold required is so intense that its production marks an epoch in the history of science; and the path that led up to the final success is strewn with many a wreck. This great achievement, although one of the grandest triumphs of man over the forces of nature, can hardly be called a discovery or an invention. Like all great advances in human knowledge, it has been a growth,—an aggregation of discoveries and inventions rather than a single stroke of genius. It is the culmination of a line of study and experiment which was commenced more than a hundred years ago, and which has given us all that we know of making artificial ice, of cold storage, and of modern methods of refrigeration.

In order to get a mental grasp of this matter we must study for a few moments the operations of heat. Of the real power behind the manifestation we call heat, we have absolutely no knowledge. And as to how it manifests itself to us, our ignorance is almost as profound. Newton, and many before him, believed that heat was minute particles of matter projected from the sun, reflected about the earth, and solidified in vegetable and mineral formations. But

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