ld is annually beaten into ornaments for the
breasts, the fingers, the ears, the necks of women. Many a lady supposes
she is buying Parisian adornments, when _Attleborough_ could say to
her proudly, like Cornelia, "These are my jewels." The workmen of this
little town not only meet the tastes of the less fastidious classes, to
whom all that glisters is gold, but they shape the purest metal into
artistic and effective patterns. When the Koh-i-noor--the Mountain of
Light--was to be fashioned, it was found to be almost as formidable a
task as that of Xerxes, when he undertook to hew Mount Athos to the
shape of man. The great crystal was sent to Holland, as the only place
where it could be properly cut. We have lately seen a brilliant which,
if not a mountain of light, was yet a very respectable mound of
radiance, valued at some ten or twelve thousand dollars, cut in this
virgin settlement, and exposed in one of our shop-windows to tempt our
frugal villagers.

Monsieur Trousseau, Professor in the Medical School of Paris, delivered
a discursive lecture not long ago, in which he soared from the region
of drugs, his well-known special province, into the thin atmosphere
of aesthetics. It is the influence that surrounds his fortunate
fellow-citizens, he declares, which alone preserves their intellectual
supremacy. If a Parisian milliner, he says, remove to New York, she will
so degenerate in the course of a couple of years that the squaw of a
Choctaw chief would be ashamed to wear one of her bonnets.

Listen, O Parisian cockney, pecking among the brood most plethoric with
conceit, of all the coop-fed citizens who tread the pavements of earth's
many-chimneyed towns! America has made implements of husbandry which
out-mow and out-reap the world. She has contrived man-slaying engines
which kill people faster than any others. She has modelled the
wave-slicing clipper which outsails all your argosies and armadas.
She has revolutionized naval warfare once by the steamboat. She has
revolutionized it a second time by planting towers of iron on the
elephantine backs of the waves. She has invented the sewing-machine to
save the dainty fingers of your virtuous grisettes from uncongenial
toil, so that Fifine and Fretillon may have more leisure for
self-development. She has taught you a whole new system of labor in her
machinery for making watches and rifles. She has bestowed upon you and
all the world an anodyne which enables you to cut arm