hat which strikes the European most in his first walk through New York streets is the absence of stupid faces. All are not handsome, but all are intelligent-looking and full of life. The next thing that strikes him is the well-grown look of the people. Few or no deformities. He does not see one halt or hunchbacked person out of the ten thousand he may meet. With the exception of the old people, few have defective sight. Apart from the complexion, which is pale, everything seems to indicate an active, strong, healthy people. The constant crossing of races must daily tend to the improving of the Americans, physically and intellectually.
You see so many thin men and so many stout women, that you almost immediately conclude that the former live in a furnace of activity, and the latter in cotton-wool. This impression grows upon you, and soon takes the form of a conviction.
The Americans do not walk much. It is not that they are indolent. Far from it. It is because their legs will not carry them fast enough.
The faces of the men you meet look absorbed in thought. Their hats are well down on their heads. This, again, is a sign of intelligence. Do not smile. The fool perches his hat on his head, the man with a well-filled brain puts his head into its covering.
These same faces are pale, and you see many prematurely grey heads. The want of open-air exercise, the dryness of the atmosphere, the suffocating heat of the rooms, the vitiated air in the houses which seem to have windows only for the purpose of letting in a little light, easily explain this double phenomenon.
The women of every country are unanimous—in pronouncing the American men handsome; and as there are few men who do not think the American women lovely, there can be but one opinion on the subject: the American race is a good-looking one. But that which makes the charm of the men's faces is not regularity of feature; it is, as I have already said, the intelligence written on them, the wonderful, the amazing activity that animates them.
This activity you find in all stations of society, in the financial world, the literary world, the world of politics, everywhere. It is a fever with which the whole nation is smitten.
In the eyes of the worthy, peaceful Frenchman who has not travelled, an American is a lunatic who does nothing like other people. After all, eccentricity is but an exaggerated form of activity; but for certain people with narrow ideas, eccentricity and madness are but one and the same thing.