His regret at losing his money is by no means commensurate with his desire to make it.  In this there is a living spirit which to me divests the dollar-worshiping idolatry of something of its ugliness.  The hand when closed on the gold is instantly reopened.  The idolator is anxious to get, but he is anxious also to spend.  He is energetic to the last, and has no comfort with his stock unless it breeds with Transatlantic rapidity of procreation.

So much I say, being anxious to scrape off some of that daub of black paint with which I have smeared the face of my New Yorker; but not desiring to scrape it all off.  For myself, I do not love to live amid the clink of gold, and never have “a good time,” as the Americans say, when the price of shares and percentages come up in conversation.  That state of men’s minds here which I have endeavored to explain tends, I think, to make New York disagreeable.  A stranger there who has no great interest in percentages soon finds himself anxious to escape.  By degrees he perceives that he is out of his element, and had better go away.  He calls at the bank, and when he shows himself ignorant as to the price at which his sovereigns should be done, he is conscious that he is ridiculous.  He is like a man who goes out hunting for the first time at forty years of age.  He feels himself to be in the wrong place, and is anxious to get out of it.  Such was my experience of New York, at each of the visits that I paid to it.

But yet, I say again, no other American city is so intensely American as New York.  It is generally considered that the inhabitants of New England, the Yankees properly so called, have the American characteristics of physiognomy in the fullest degree.  The lantern jaws, the thin and lithe body, the dry face on which there has been no tint of the rose since the baby’s long-clothes were first abandoned, the harsh, thick hair, the thin lips, the intelligent eyes, the sharp voice with the nasal twang—­not altogether harsh, though sharp and nasal—­all these traits are supposed to belong especially to the Yankee.  Perhaps it was so once, but at present they are, I think, more universally common in New York than in any other part of the States.  Go to Wall Street, the front of the Astor House, and the regions about Trinity Church, and you will find them in their fullest perfection.

What circumstances of blood or food, of early habit or subsequent education, have created for the latter-day American his present physiognomy?  It is as completely marked, as much his own, as is that of any race under the sun that has bred in and in for centuries.  But the American owns a more mixed blood than any other race known.  The chief stock is English, which is itself so mixed that no man can trace its ramifications.  With this are mingled the bloods of Ireland, Holland, France, Sweden, and Germany.  All this has been done within but a few years, so that the American may be said to have no claim to