"The _Sin_ of the American nation, sir, is a holiday. The unpardonable folly is a LAUGH. Sport is unworthy a man born on American soil. Recreation is an exploded idea, sir, which has come down to us from a former generation, and if there is anything which an American looks upon with utter contempt, it is a former generation. There is no retrospect or prospect between the Atlantic and the Pacific. It is now and always a simple _spect_. Every man has a likeness of Mammon set up on his mantel, and to spare one day from the worship of that small god, is to expose himself to the danger of not being an old man at thirty, and comfortably into his grave before fifty. Some unfortunate individuals manage to get beyond fifty, but they are like old parchments, faded, yellow, and wrinkled, with all the characters upon them effaced. American babies are begotten of _fret on one side, and hurry on the other_, and these two forces are forever propelling them toward a six-by-two patch of ground with a stone at each end, one of which is Ananias and the other Sapphira. American babies are _never children_, sir. They make one step from bibs to breeches, and from pinafores to _paniers_. An American man of fourteen has squeezed the orange of life dry, and an American woman of twelve is ready to receive proposals of marriage, and sink her identity in kettles and pans. There is no law against it, sir. Nature has kindly preordained that there shall be no bar in the intimate relations of humanity and asininity. If a man wants to go through life like a locomotive, I suppose there is nothing to prevent it, but I don't want him to ask me to ride on his train. I know the rails are laid on every kindly feeling and elegant grace, and that the smallest flower can't grow between them. I know that there are all sorts of obstructions on the track, bankruptcies, suicides, diseases, etc., which will prevent him from getting into the three score and ten station which God Almighty intended for him. People come into the world in a great hurry, and immediately commence their preparations to get out of it. They pile up a heap of treasures, and by the time they get it piled up, under the sod they go, where there is not room for a five cent shin-plaster.