"Nearly all the small shopkeepers, fruit-dealers, and bar-keepers, sell candy and sugar-cakes, which they either prepare themselves or obtain from confectioners who not only carry on a wholesale business, _but even send large quantities of their products to the country dealers_. In Philadelphia, warm cakes are carried about for sale in the streets,[1] the bearers thereof announcing their presence by the sound of a bell. French confectioners have already done much in this country toward improving the public taste, and excellent _bonsbons à la francaise_ are now actually manufactured here, though we must admit that in the country there is a great consumption of confectionery and cakes by no means of a very good quality. In these regions a taste for '_horses_' (which are of cake greatly resembling gingerbread and made in the form of a horse) universally predominates, and not only children but even adults select these as a favorite dainty. It is no unusual spectacle to behold in the northern states an entire court--judge, jury, and lawyers--regaling themselves during an important trial on horse-cakes!" Whether Herr Fleischmann received this legal anecdote on hearsay, or whether his German soul was actually startled by stumbling upon such an extraordinary legal spectacle, we will not here inquire. In Germany the favorite dainty in this line is a _pretzel_, or carnival cake, in the form of a two-headed serpent, which antiquaries declare to be of oriental origin, and to conceal divers horrific mysteries of deeply metaphysical import. From the solemnity of tone with which Herr Fleischmann imparts this horse-cake story, we are half inclined to suspect that he inferred that a great ethical mystery, in some way connected with the administration of justice in America, might thus be conveyed. Under the head of spirit distilleries our author enters into a _naïf_ and enthusiastic defence of good brandy, but still highly approves of the American custom of substituting coffee for grog in merchant vessels, on which he remarks that it is not allowed to soldiers or sailors to bring spirits into the forts or ships. "But they are so extravagantly fond of liquor as to invent every imaginable method of evading the regulation. I have been told," he says, "by persons of the highest credibility that during the night whisky is not unfrequently brought to the vicinity of military stations, and that the sentinels, after filling the barrels of their muskets therewith, bring it into the 'watch-room,' and divide the _loading_ with their comrades."