Besides the productions of nature that I have mentioned, I procured some
specimens of their cloth, a few light toys, a lady's turban decorated
with cantharides, a pair of slippers with heavy metallic soles, which
are used there for walking in a strong wind, and by the dancing girls to
prevent their jumping too high. As this metal, which gravitates to the
moon, is repelled from the earth, these slippers assist the wearer here
in springing from the ground as much as they impeded it in the moon, and
therefore I have lent them to Madame ----, of the New-York Theatre, who
is thus enabled to astonish and delight the spectators with her
wonderful lightness and agility.
But there is nothing that I have brought which I prize so highly as a
few of their manuscripts. The Lunarians write as we do, from left to
right; but when their words consist of more than one syllable, all the
subsequent syllables are put over the first, so that what we call _long
words_, they call _high_ ones: which mode of writing makes them more
striking to the eye. This peculiarity has, perhaps, had some effect in
giving their writers a magniloquence of style, something like that which
so laudably characterises our Fourth of July Orations and Funeral
Panegyrics: that composition being thought the finest in which the words
stand highest. Another advantage of this mode of writing is, that they
can crowd more in a small page, so that a long discourse, if it is also
very eloquent, may be compressed in a single page.
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