The two curiosities in the United States are fat people and servants. Both run away in a velocipedal hurry; the former into sharp bargains, and the latter into independent powers which dictate treaties and make alliances like other self-governing communities. An American family is like a South Carolina regiment, all officers and no privates; a boarding-house, a Swiss confederacy, in which the cantons, wedged into neutralizing elements, get forward like a stool braced every-way and equipoised into an aching discomfort; and a hotel, like twenty German _Bunds_ entangled by contrarious independent interests that knot themselves into teasing discontents, and fret into jars which hold a variety of unpreserved, acidulating fruits. The freest joke in all America is one of its large hotels, which fancies Axminster carpets and chandeliers in a large parlor, and numerous discomforts packed in ever-dwindling rooms, to be happiness. But then the “gentlemanly proprietor” makes up for all this in the bills, which convince all the guests, that they must have enjoyed themselves and at an American rate of speed. Trade has also had its great advances, not only in the figures which stand in merchants’ magazines like pyramids, with bases always widening downwards, but in the dwindling measures, quarts, gallons, pecks, and bushels, and the waning qualities which sharpen upwards to steady apexes. How to make up in the bill what is taken from the body is a critical study, in which most tradesmen have, without any prizes offered by outsiders, become great proficients. If that man is a public benefactor who makes two blades grow in the place of one, surely he may be rewarded with a passing notice, who takes all the steel out of the one sent to him for repairs, and then divides up the instrument into several blades. Making water into wine, chalk into milk, chemicals into as many varieties of drinkables as there are days of the year, and diluting articles deemed too strong when left to their raw native vigor, so as to adapt them to our weakened constitutions, attest the beneficent designs of manufacturers and merchants upon Americans of plethoric habits. Peabodies shelling out to poorbodies furnish examples of abundant charity not so widely touching as these. To make a small measure go twice as far as a large one is more than a feat; it approaches creation. What may in time be considered a double bed, it is impossible yet to foresee; but certain it is, that while single beds are increasing to an alarmingly wide extent, their narrowness is becoming such as to require a new definition of a line to avoid disagreeable collisions.