ity for destroying things; they can destroy anything. They have even
invented a phrase for it--running a thing into the ground. They have
perfected the art of making so much of a thing as to kill it; they can
magnify a man or a recreation or an institution to death. And they do it
with such a hearty good-will and enjoyment. Their motto is that you
cannot have too much of a good thing. They have almost made funerals
unpopular by over-elaboration and display, especially what are called
public funerals, in which an effort is made to confer great distinction
on the dead. So far has it been carried often that there has been a
reaction of popular sentiment and people have wished the man were alive.
We prosecute everything so vigorously that we speedily either wear it out
or wear ourselves out on it, whether it is a game, or a festival, or a
holiday. We can use up any sport or game ever invented quicker than any
other people. We can practice anything, like a vegetable diet, for
instance, to an absurd conclusion with more vim than any other nation.
This trait has its advantages; nowhere else will a delusion run so fast,
and so soon run up a tree--another of our happy phrases. There is a
largeness and exuberance about us which run even into our ordinary
phraseology. The sympathetic clergyman, coming from the bedside of a
parishioner dying of dropsy, says, with a heavy sigh, "The poor fellow is
just swelling away."

Is Christmas swelling away? If it is not, it is scarcely our fault. Since
the American nation fairly got hold of the holiday--in some parts of the
country, as in New England, it has been universal only about fifty
years--we have made it hum, as we like to say. We have appropriated the
English conviviality, the German simplicity, the Roman pomp, and we have
added to it an element of expense in keeping with our own greatness. Is
anybody beginning to feel it a burden, this sweet festival of charity and
good-will, and to look forward to it with apprehension? Is the time
approaching when we shall want to get somebody to play it for us, like
base-ball? Anything that interrupts the ordinary flow of life, introduces
into it, in short, a social cyclone that upsets everything for a
fortnight, may in time be as hard to bear as that festival of housewives
called housecleaning, that riot of cleanliness which men fear as they do
a panic in business. Taking into account the present preparations for
Christmas, and the time it takes to