which I expect every day.  You may easily guess at my uneasy situation.  But I am, however, comforted in some degree, by the glory that accrues to me from it, and a reflection on the contempt I should otherwise fall under.  You won’t know what to make of this speech; but, in this country, ’tis more despicable to be married and not fruitful, than ’tis with us to be fruitful before marriage.  They have a notion, that whenever a woman leaves off bringing forth children, ’tis because she is too old for that business, whatever her face says to the contrary.  This opinion makes the ladies here so ready to make proofs of their youth, (which is as necessary, in order to be a received beauty, as it is to shew the proofs of nobility, to be admitted knights of Malta) that they do not content themselves with using the natural means, but fly to all sorts of quackeries, to avoid the scandal of being past childbearing, and often kill themselves by them.  Without any exaggeration, all the women of my acquaintance have twelve or thirteen children; and the old ones boast of having had five and twenty, or thirty a-piece, and are respected according to the number they have produced.—­When they are with child, ’tis their common expression to say, They hope God will be so merciful as to send them two this time; and when I have asked them sometimes, How they expected to provide for such a flock as they desire?  They answered, That the plague will certainly kill half of them; which, indeed, generally happens, without much concern to the parents, who are satisfied with the vanity of having brought forth so plentifully.  The French ambassadress is forced to comply with this fashion as well as myself.  She has not been here much above a year, and has lain in once, and is big again.  What is most wonderful, is, the exemption they seem to enjoy from the curse entailed on the sex.  They see all company on the day of their delivery, and, at the fortnight’s end, return visits, set out in their jewels and new clothes.  I wish I may find the influence of the climate in this particular.  But I fear I shall continue an English woman in that affair, as well as I do in my dread of fire and plague, which are two things very little feared here.  Most families have had their houses burnt down once or twice, occasioned by their extraordinary way of warming themselves, which is neither by chimnies (sic) nor stoves, but by a certain machine called a tendour, the height of two feet, in the form of a table, covered with a fine carpet or embroidery.  This is made only of wood, and they put into it a small quantity of hot ashes, and sit with their legs under the carpet.  At this table they work, read and very often, sleep; and, if they chance to dream, kick down the tendour, and the hot ashes commonly set the house on fire.  There were five hundred houses burnt in this manner about a fortnight ago, and I have seen several of the owners since, who seem not at all moved at so common a misfortune.  They put their goods into a bark, and see their houses burn with great philosophy, their persons being very seldom endangered, having no stairs to descend.