Among the mechanical inventions, the gin for cleaning cotton-seeds out of the white tangle, combing the shock head of the old king, and thus making him at once a power and a presentable personage among other self-constituted sovereigns,—an invention wrought out in 1793 by a cute Yankee,—was one which, in its results directly on the material, and indirectly on the moral, condition of the United States stands eminently foremost. By the old hand-picking process, the slave had his hands full to separate the seeds from a single pound of cotton a day. The new mechanical picker cleaned six thousand six hundred pounds within the same time. The gin so intoxicated the planter, that he committed all sorts of political extravagances and uttered many maudlin ejaculations, until finally, in 1861, he threw himself down upon a bed of 3,400,000 bales in the condition of Noah when, after the flood, he became very hilarious in the presence of his children. Ham laughed exceedingly at the spectacle of the American Noah; but Japhet, after allowing the drunkenness four years to cool, at last put over the offensive nakedness a large patch-work blanket, reconstructed at a quilting-match in Washington. It is expected that hereafter his majesty will wear colors of a faster moral hue than before he so abused the gin. Commerce, no longer tied up to the shore by the English navigation acts, began, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, to creep out from the commodious bays and harbors of our long, wavy coast; and soon, not content with these timorous tentatives, put on waistbands, top-gallant manners, and flaunting gear, and went boldly courting among the wine-cheeked nations, the silk-growing empires, and spicy-tongued kingdoms of the earth. Importations, of course, not only put many new things on, but in, the heads of the emancipated Americans, who showed their independence, then as now, by buying abroad liberally the things which they did not make or need here. In spite of sumptuary laws, which in some of the new States imposed fines for owning more than one silk gown in a family, and which banished jewelry from homes still innocent of aught but trinkets that cost less money than taste, the beaux and belles of the period whereof we speak began to put on hairs where nature had forgotten to furnish them, and supplied from Paris, in amounts limited it is true, appliances to remedy defects which fashion insisted had been left by the Creator, in making up woman from a sleepy man. Hoops every few years girdled the larger or smaller conceits of Madam Mode’s improved figures. Of course Paris was always finding mistakes in the original Eden pattern; and her customers were ever ready to try her suggestions as to the newest mode of correcting them. Top-gears naturally varied like the _crescendo et diminuendo_ notes in music, or the equally flexible bars of the gold market, whose undulating lines draw such different tunes from its performers, and sometimes run so high