Mercantile failures, elsewhere hurtful, are with us hurried on into vivacious benefits, dividing up, before the expiration of the credits given, the accumulated profits which otherwise might accumulate in stagnating dulness in the firm. A steady increase of wages is solving, too, those perplexing theories how to balance capital and labor; a weekly distribution of earnings keeping down injudicious balances in the bank. The frequent jumps of men from low places into high ones, with a celerity very pleasing to their families and often to their creditors, show that the world is governed too much; for acting on this Jeffersonian maxim, most of these ready leapers leave off the governing part and expend their activities in securing, along with their weak salaries, strong flying benefits, which only light on the vigilant. While the velocipedal ways of Americans thus cut across their own country, it is in foreign fields that they are most striking and cutting. Crossing the well-worn paths of Europe, scattering high-premium gold on those jolly fellows, landlords and waiters, they ridge its old historic surfaces with little histories which the facetious persons, who catch sight of them as they whiz through histories, which they leave grandly behind them and all unknown, retail with as much glee, as the travellers themselves once did saleratus, fine-cut nails, or bobinet. Their scant intellectual stores and unfurnished stock of knowledge, so far from embarrassing, only enable them to spin on faster. Mythology, paintings, biographies, architecture, are soon wound up on their clean spindles. Another class, like aeronautic vessels, have gaseous heads and heavy undergearing, which enable them to run over and run down everything abroad by swift-moving slangs. They always float by the bad air of their own heads, and are apt to anchor in vicious soils. These they can-can. The spent money surprises the hotel squeezers; the spent morals astonish themselves by the ease with which they lose their little all. But of all the fast classes in America, that is the most velocipedal which, having expressed themselves through the modish follies of the largest American cities, are transported to the stronger vices of Paris. Tired of tapping the younger trees of American growth, they spend the rest of their precious lives in pecking assiduously the rotten parts of foreign woods, content with the phosphoric slime of decay and dissolving maturities. CHAPTER XXI. PUZZLES AND CROSS-READINGS; OR, JOHNSON’S ENTERTAINMENTS. APRIL 14, 1865, TO MARCH 4, 1869.