Many travellers who here, in the States, are considered very impertinent, but who nevertheless write with the most amiable intentions, attribute the cold taciturnity of Americans to their preoccupation with commercial combinations or political affairs. I believe that, without doing them injustice, one might very often attribute it to the labour of the digestive organs, put four times a-day to a severe task, and which frequently, in their fatigue, require the employment of soda-water, and almost continually the acrid and hideous mastication of a roll of tobacco. The fact is, that in general the American is much more silent than the Turk. There is also this difference between them--the Turk, seated on a carpet, with his silken vest, his long beard, his large turban, appears nobly indolent or gently meditative, and the stranger's eye may rest with pleasure on his calm and benevolent physiognomy; the silence of the American, on the contrary, is gloomy and uneasy, dry and hard, (_sec et dur_.) His countenance is _pointed_, his movements are stiff and angular. His repose is not the happy placidity of the Oriental, or of the southern European--the enjoyment of _kief_, the pleasure of the siesta; it is a sort of prostration, agitated from time to time by a feverish movement." The following sketch is certainly not very flattering. After laying down the rather novel proposition, that man is one of the ugliest of created animals, M. Marmier proceeds to prove the American the ugliest of all civilised races of men:-- "Picture to yourself, if you please, a lean figure with bony wrists, feet of dimensions that would for ever tarnish the scutcheon of a gentleman, a hat stuck upon the back of the head, straight hair; a cheek swollen, not by an accidental cold, but from morning till night by a lump of tobacco; lips stained yellow by the juice of the same plant; a black coat with narrow skirts, a tumbled shirt, the gloves of a gendarme,[5] trousers in harmony with the rest of the equipment, and you will have before you the exact portrait of a thoroughbred Yankee." [5] Thick clumsy buckskin gloves.