prefer the splendor of wealth and the show of enjoyment to the simplicity of manners and the pure pleasures which result from it.

If there is a town on the American continent where the English luxury displays its follies, it is New York.

You will find here the English fashions: in the dress of the women you will see the most brilliant silks, gauzes, hats, and borrowed hair; equipages are rare, but they are elegant; the men have more simplicity in their dress; they disdain gewgaws, but they take their revenge in the luxury of the table; luxury forms already a class of men very dangerous to society; I mean bachelors; the expense of women causes matrimony to be dreaded by men.
Tea forms, as in England, the basis of parties of pleasure; many things are dearer here than in France; a hairdresser asks twenty shilling a month; washing costs four shillings a dozen."* *Quoted by Henry Tuckerman, "America and her Commentators," 1886.
An American writer of a later date, looking back upon his earlier years, was impressed by this same extravagance, and his testimony may well be used to strengthen the impression which it is the purpose of the present narrative to convey: "The French and British armies circulated immense sums of money in gold and silver coin, which had the effect of driving out of circulation the wretched paper currency which had till then prevailed.

Immense quantities of British and French goods were soon imported: our people imbibed a taste for foreign fashions and luxury; and in the course of two or three years, from the close of the war, such an entire change had taken place in the habits and manners of our inhabitants, that it almost appeared as if we had suddenly become a different nation.

The staid and sober habits of our ancestors, with their plain home-manufactured clothing, were suddenly laid aside, and European goods of fine quality adopted in their stead.