Fastness, except in the colors of our cheeks and chintzes and in the movement of our mails, works its curious ways through all manifestations of American civilization. Over a small, old, long-cultivated territory, like most of the European, life moves respectably slow, careful of its savings, gathered up by centuries of work and put out at low rates of interest; across continental stretches like ours, sweeping in wide districts and materials of unbundled, aching plenty, it hastens with panting speed, and can afford to lose everything except time. Our great areas, therefore, make us lively, their vast opportunities, restless, wide-talking, and manifesting the generous coarseness of a large-grained breadth. Out of these alone would come marked characteristics; but when these are further quickened by accelerating activities of discovery in all departments, and by mechanical inventions of vast power in translating man and his products over the earth, the result is rapid brain-work, stimulating action, quick combinations, eruptive and vivacious speech. M. Varet, a French savan, has ascertained that a fly caught by him in France made three hundred and thirty movements of his wings in a second. This is rapid work; but a Wall Street bull will toss his horns twice as fast. The larger trains of thought thus started will run of themselves with time-table exactness. We shall only accompany a few special excursion ideas a short distance from the main depot. An impatient unrest under discipline and restrictions, while kept below fever heat by the wet bandages of a self-imposed law, makes jails double punishments for American criminals, and homes often houses for the detention of juveniles under sixteen. Confinements, except to a small class of our married population, is an abridgment of enterprising work, which, if continued beyond a natural law that prescribes sleep to all and a longer period of inactivity to the special class just named, would be a grievance, calling at least for a convention, addresses, and agitation to get rid of. The distress of hurry which vexes the _vis inertiæ_ out of our brains, stirs our intellectual pans continually, so that we do not always get the natural cream of ideas. An American is always working for condensed milk processes; to compress a cow into a milk-pot, or utilize all the herds in his neighborhood on his breakfast-table, in a way unheard of elsewhere. Of course this wide-reaching hurry, which grasps large results and scorns the domestic economies, that occupy the thoughts of people elsewhere, refuses to be concerned for any length of time with the importunities of suffering stomachs.