in three days had mustered into service every dress and sash and ribbon
and rag 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 _pièce de résistance_ of full
dress. At the sea-side 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 our Northern winter, he may have a mighty hunger and
thirst, when he is thawed out, to see human faces and hear human voices;
but even then Saratoga is not the place to go to, on account of this very
artificialness. By artificial I do not mean deceitful. I saw nobody but
nice people there, smooth, kind, and polite. By artificial I mean wrought
up. You don't get at the heart of things. Artificialness spreads and spans
all with a crystal barrier,--invisible, but palpable. Nothing was left to