I have a heaviness of heart, which has never left me since I read your letter:  I am shocked at the idea of giving pain to the best parent that ever existed; yet have less hope than ever of seeing England, without giving up the tender friend, the dear companion, the adored mistress; in short the very woman I have all my life been in search of:  I am also hurt that I cannot place this object of all my wishes in a station equal to that she has rejected, and I begin to think rejected for me.

I never before repined at seeing the gifts of fortune lavished on the unworthy.

Adieu, my dear!  I will write again when I can write more chearfully.

      Your affectionate
          Ed. Rivers.

LETTER 72.

To the Earl of ——.

My Lord,

Silleri, Feb. 20.

Your Lordship does me great honor in supposing me capable of giving any satisfactory account of a country in which I have spent only a few months.

As a proof, however, of my zeal, and the very strong desire I have to merit the esteem you honor me with, I shall communicate from time to time the little I have observed, and may observe, as well as what I hear from good authority, with that lively pleasure with which I have ever obeyed every command of your Lordship’s.

The French, in the first settling this colony, seem to have had an eye only to the conquest of ours:  their whole system of policy seems to have been military, not commercial; or only so far commercial as was necessary to supply the wants, and by so doing to gain the friendship, of the savages, in order to make use of them against us.

The lands are held on military tenure:  every peasant is a soldier, every seigneur an officer, and both serve without pay whenever called upon; this service is, except a very small quit-rent by way of acknowledgement, all they pay for their lands:  the seigneur holds of the crown, the peasant of the seigneur, who is at once his lord and commander.

The peasants are in general tall and robust, notwithstanding their excessive indolence; they love war, and hate labor; are brave, hardy, alert in the field, but lazy and inactive at home; in which they resemble the savages, whose manners they seem strongly to have imbibed.  The government appears to have encouraged a military spirit all over the colony; though ignorant and stupid to a great degree, these peasants have a strong sense of honor; and though they serve, as I have said, without pay, are never so happy as when called to the field.

They are excessively vain, and not only look on the French as the only civilized nation in the world, but on themselves as the flower of the French nation:  they had, I am told, a great aversion to the regular troops which came from France in the late war, and a contempt equal to that aversion; they however had an affection and esteem for the late Marquis De Montcalm, which almost rose to idolatry; and I have even at this distance of time seen many of them in tears at the mention of his name:  an honest tribute to the memory of a commander equally brave and humane; for whom his enemies wept even on the day when their own hero fell.