If a Frenchman should unintentionally run against you, would he not ask your pardon with the politest possible bow? If a German should encounter you in the same unintentionally unceremonious way, would he not in all probability, after the recoil, look at you with inquiring eyes, with a mixture of phlegmatic coolness and curiosity, and partly as an exclamation, partly as an interrogation, utter the monosyllable "So!"? He would not be so much occupied in trying to parry the blunder gracefully as in thinking of its cause, with that love of sifting which involuntarily exhibits itself even in little things, or with that tendency to take even jokes gravely which originated the fable of Pope Joan, and led a learned commentator, in his annotations on Thucydides, to cite, with all the ponderous clang of a critical Latin note, the factions "of the Long Pipes and the Short Pipes, mentioned by Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker in his _History of New York_," as a grave historic parallel to the factions at Athens and those of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines! Wonderful is the exactness in research, as well as the gravity, of the Teuton--his reflectiveness, his going to the bottom of the minutiae of facts, as well as his recourse to his "inner consciousness" when the concrete fails him. Thoroughness, quiet, plodding thoroughness--a looking at things in all their bearings, an exhaustive (as well as exhausting) treatment of a subject, whether of fact or of speculation, a constant striving to _find out_ all about whatever he takes in hand--is not this one of his most marked characteristics? And so, is it not natural that his greeting should be, if he is gravely polite, "Wie _befinden_ Sie sich?" ("How do you _find_ yourself?")? Lastly, the Anglo-Saxon greeting has its revelation of character no less than the others. No corner of the earth is ignorant of the representatives of that sturdy race whose commerce is worldwide; whose inventions have revolutionized ways and means of getting and doing and having things; whose enterprise is boundless; whose self-contained courage is resistless in onset as it is strong in resistance; whose busy going to and fro, or whose steady home-work, always has an eye to the main chance; whose stateliness as shown in the conservative wealth of the Old England is matched by its progressiveness as developed in the New; whose Anglo-Saxon _homes_ are models of what is nowhere else so readily found, "home comforts," won by hard work or conserved by happy inheritance. Has not the Anglo-Saxon a character all his own--a compound, doubtless, of the good (and often the bad) elements which he has absorbed with his natural acquisitiveness from others? And can the same number of words better gather up the sum and substance of it than his salutation, "How do you _do_?"? J. A. H. SEASONABLE READING.