His easy familiarity with great men was beautiful to see, and when Philip learned what a tremendous underground influence this little ignoramus had, he no longer wondered at the queer appointments and the queerer legislation.
Philip was not long in discovering that people in Washington did not differ much from other people; they had the same meannesses, generosities, and tastes: A Washington boarding house had the odor of a boarding house the world over.
Col.

Sellers was as unchanged as any one Philip saw whom he had known elsewhere.

Washington appeared to be the native element of this man.
His pretentions were equal to any he encountered there.

He saw nothing in its society that equalled that of Hawkeye, he sat down to no table that could not be unfavorably contrasted with his own at home; the most airy scheme inflated in the hot air of the capital only reached in magnitude some of his lesser fancies, the by-play of his constructive imagination.
"The country is getting along very well," he said to Philip, "but our public men are too timid.

What we want is more money.