There, if a man be rich, they give him costly presents, they ask him to feasts, they invite him to drink complicated beverages; but if he be poor and in debt, they require him to do that which they term to “settle.”  The women put on a different dress almost every day; the dress is usually fine, but absurd in shape; the very shape and fashion of it changes twice in a hundred years; and did I but covet to be called an extravagant falsifier, I would say it changed even oftener.  Hair does not grow upon the American women’s heads; it is made for them by cunning workmen in the shops, and is curled and frizzled into scandalous and ungodly forms.  Some persons wear eyes of glass which they see through with facility perhaps, else they would not use them; and in the mouths of some are teeth made by the sacrilegious hand of man.  The dress of the men is laughably grotesque.  They carry no musket in ordinary life, nor no long-pointed pole; they wear no wide green-lined cloak; they wear no peaked black felt hat, no leathern gaiters reaching to the knee, no goat-skin breeches with the hair side out, no hob-nailed shoes, no prodigious spurs.  They wear a conical hat termed a “nail-kag;” a coat of saddest black; a shirt which shows dirt so easily that it has to be changed every month, and is very troublesome; things called pantaloons, which are held up by shoulder straps, and on their feet they wear boots which are ridiculous in pattern and can stand no wear.  Yet dressed in this fantastic garb, these people laughed at my costume.  In that country, books are so common that it is really no curiosity to see one.  Newspapers also.  They have a great machine which prints such things by thousands every hour.

“I saw common men, there—­men who were neither priests nor princes—­who yet absolutely owned the land they tilled.  It was not rented from the church, nor from the nobles.  I am ready to take my oath of this.  In that country you might fall from a third story window three several times, and not mash either a soldier or a priest.—­The scarcity of such people is astonishing.  In the cities you will see a dozen civilians for every soldier, and as many for every priest or preacher.  Jews, there, are treated just like human beings, instead of dogs.  They can work at any business they please; they can sell brand new goods if they want to; they can keep drug-stores; they can practice medicine among Christians; they can even shake hands with Christians if they choose; they can associate with them, just the same as one human being does with another human being; they don’t have to stay shut up in one corner of the towns; they can live in any part of a town they like best; it is said they even have the privilege of buying land and houses, and owning them themselves, though I doubt that, myself; they never have had to run races naked through the public streets, against jackasses, to please the people in carnival time; there they never have been driven by the soldiers into a church every Sunday