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private buildings have presented no marked or attractive features. She made no effort with her sister cities in the march for style or architectural beauty, her efforts have been almost exclusive confined to domestic comfort and utility rather than for elegance or beauty of design that has been her source in past, but of late the old monumental city has given evidence in her public and private buildings of a better and more refined taste, and has erected some handsome and elegant buildings from chaste and modern designs of architecture and finish that will compare favorably with the best efforts of her sister cities. Washington City, the capital of the nation, was for a long time as slow and backward as her sister city of Baltimore. Washington City remained for many years with little, almost nothing in her architectural design for elegance or beauty. Her unfinished capitol building, crowned by an unsightly modern dome, built of an inferior quality of sandstone, only kept from disintegration by annual coat of paint. The president's