A-M[)E]R'I-CAN, _n._ [Fr. _Americain_, Lat. _Americanus_, from Lat. _America_, a continent noted for the effeminacy and voluptuousness of its inhabitants.] A person devoted to luxury and pleasure. Should you think that was quite fair for your great-grandson's grandson's descendant in the twenty-seventh remove to read, who is going to be instructed about Queen Victoria and William the Conqueror? Worst of all, and most frequently quoted, is the story of the coppersmiths. The Sybarites, it is said, ordered that the coppersmiths and brass-founders should all reside in one part of the city, and bang their respective metals where the neighbors had voluntarily chosen to listen to banging. What if they did? Does not every manufacturing city practically do the same thing? What did Nicholas Tillinghast use to say to the boys and girls at Bridgewater? "The tendency of cities is to resolve themselves into order." Is not Wall Street at this hour a street of bankers? Is not the Boston Pearl Street a street of leather men? Is not the bridge at Florence given over to jewellers? Was not my valise, there, bought in Rome at the street of trunk-makers? Do not all booksellers like to huddle together as long as they can? And when Ticknor and Fields move a few inches from Washington Street to Tremont Street, do not Russell and Bates, and Childs and Jenks, and De Vries and Ibarra, follow them as soon as the shops can be got ready? "But it is the motive," pipes up the old gray ghost of propriety, who started this abuse of the Sybarites in some stupid Spartan black-broth shop (English that for _cafe_), two thousand two hundred and twenty-two years ago,--which ghost I am now belaboring,--"it is the motive. The Sybarites moved the brass-founders, because they wanted to sleep after the brass-founders got up in the morning." What if they did, you old rat in the arras? Is there any law, human or divine, which says that at one and the same hour all men shall rise from bed in this world? My excellent milkman, Mr. Whit, rises from bed daily at two o'clock. If he does not, my family, including Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, will not have their fresh milk at 7.37, at which time we breakfast or pretend to. But because he rises at two, must we all rise at two, and sit wretchedly whining on our respective camp-stools, waiting for Mr. Whit to arrive with the grateful beverage? Many is the time, when I have been watching with a sick child at five in a summer morning, when the little fellow had just dropped into a grateful morning doze, that I have listened and waited, dreading the arrival of the Providence morning express. Because I knew that, a mile and a half out of Boston, the engine would begin to blow its shrill whistle, for the purpose, I believe, of calling the Boston station-men to their duty. Three or four minutes of that _skre-e-e-e_ must there be, as that train swept by our end of the town. And hoping and wishing never did any good; the train