am
inclined to fancy my situation would be much the most agreable.

I should pout a month, and then look about for another lover; whilst
the tender Emily would

"Sit like patience on a monument,"

and pine herself into a consumption.

Adieu! They wait for me.

Yours,
A. Fermor.

Tuesday, midnight.

We have had a very agreable day, Lucy, a pretty enough kind of a
ball, and every body in good humor: I danced with Fitzgerald, whom I
never knew so agreable.

Happy love is gay, I find; Emily is all sprightliness, your
brother's eyes have never left her one moment, and her blushes seemed
to shew her sense of the distinction; I never knew her look so handsome
as this day.

Do you know I felt for Madame Des Roches? Emily was excessively
complaisant to her: she returned her civility, but I could perceive a
kind of constraint in her manner, very different from the ease of her
behaviour when we saw her before: she felt the attention of Rivers to
Emily very strongly: in short, the ladies seemed to have changed
characters for the day.

We supped with your brother on our return, and from his windows,
which look on the river St. Charles, had the pleasure of observing one
of the most beautiful objects imaginable, which I never remember to
have seen before this evening.

You are to observe the winter method of fishing here, is to break
openings like small fish ponds on the ice, to which the fish coming for
air, are taken in prodigious quantities on the surface.

To shelter themselves from the excessive cold of the night, the
fishermen build small houses of ice on the river, which are arranged in
a semicircular form, and extend near a quarter of a mile, and which,
from the blazing fires within, have a brilliant transparency and vivid
lustre, not easy either to imagine or to describe: the starry
semicircle looks like an immense crescent of diamonds, on which the sun
darts his meridian rays.

Absolutely, Lucy, you see nothing in Europe: you are cultivated, you
have the tame beauties of art; but to see nature in her lovely wild
luxuriance, you must visit your brother when he is prince of the
Kamaraskas.

Adieu!
Your faithful
A. Fermor.

The variety, as well of grand objects, as of amusements, in this
country, confirms me in an opinion I have always had, that Providence
had made the conveniences and inconveniences of life nearly equal every
where.

We have pleasures here ev