ted me to dinner; and, happily, the secretary of the council has
provided me with money, having allowed me to use his credit in buying
whatever I need. The streets of the Cape are well set out; some are
watered by canals, and most of them are planted with oak trees. The
fronts of the houses are shadowed by their foliage; every door has seats
on both sides in brick or turf, on which sit fresh and rosy-faced women.
There is no gambling at the Cape, no play-acting or novel reading. The
people are content with the domestic happiness that virtue brings in its
train. Every day brings the same duties and pleasures. There are no
spectacles at the Cape and no one wants any; every man there has in his
own home all that he desires. Happy servants, well-bred children, good
wives: these are pleasures that fiction does not give.

A quiet life of this sort furnishes little matter for conversation, so
the Dutchmen of the Cape do not talk very much. They are a rather
melancholic people, and they prefer to feel rather than to argue. So
little happens, perhaps, that they have nothing to talk about; but what
does it matter if the mind is empty when the heart is full, and when the
tender emotions of nature can move it without being excited by artifice
or constrained by a false decorum? When the girls of the Cape fall in
love, they artlessly avow their feelings, but they insist on choosing
their own husbands. The lads show the same frankness. The good faith
which the young persons of each sex keep towards each other generally
results in a happy marriage. Love with them is combined with esteem, and
this nourishes all during life in their constant souls that desire to
please which married persons in some other countries only show outside
their own home.

It was with much regret that I left these worthy people, but I am not
sorry to return to France. I prefer my own country to all others, not
because it is more beautiful, but because I was born and bred there.
Happy is the man who sees again the field in which he learnt to walk and
the orchard which he used to play in! Happier still is he who has never
quitted the paternal roof! How many voyagers return and yet find no
place of retreat. Of their friends, some are dead, others are gone
away; but life is only a brief voyage, and the age of man a rapid day.
I wish to forget the storms of it, and remember only in these letters
the goodness, the virtue, and the constancy that I have met with.
Perha