anybody ever did a larger business on a smaller capital; but
I put a bold face on it. I cherish the hope that nobody
suspected I could not go on in that ruinous way all summer,--
I, who in three days had mustered into service every dress and
sash and ribbon and that I had had in three years or expected
to have in three more. But I never will, if I can help it,
hold my head down where other people are holding their heads up.

I would not be understood as decrying or depreciating dress.
It is a duty as well as a delight. Mrs. Madison is reported
to have said that she would never forgive a young lady who did
not dress to please, or one who seemed pleased with her dress.
And not only young ladies, but old ladies and old gentlemen,
and everybody, ought to make their dress a concord and not a
discord. But Saratoga is pitched on a perpetual falsetto, and
stuns you. One becomes sated with an interminable piece de
resistance of full dress. At the seaside you bathe; at the
mountains you put on stout boots and coarse frocks and go
a-fishing; but Saratoga never "lets up,"--if I may be pardoned
the phrase. Consequently, you see much of crinoline and little
of character. You have to get at the human nature just as
Thoreau used to get at bird-nature and fish-nature and
turtle-nature, by sitting perfectly still in one place and
waiting patiently till it comes out. You see more of the
reality of people in a single day's tramp than in twenty days
of guarded monotone. Now I cannot conceive of any reason why
people should go to Saratoga, except to see people. True, as
a general thing, they are the last objects you desire to see,
when you are summering. But if one has been cooped up in the
house or blocked up in the country during the nine months of