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-keg;' 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

The Innocents Abroad