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(BELLA FERMOR TO MISS RIVERS. LONDON)
"Sillery, Sept. 20th, (1766) - 10 o'clock.
"Ah! we are vastly to be pitied; no beaux at all at the general's,
only about six to one; a pretty proportion, and what I hope always to
see. We - the ladies I mean - drink chocolate with the general to-
morrow, and he gives us a ball on Thursday; you would not know Quebec
again. Nothing but smiling faces now: all gay as never was - the
sweetest country in the world. Never expect to see me in England
again; one is really somebody here. I have been asked to dance by only
twenty-seven. ..."
Ah! who would not forgive the frolicsome Bella all her flirtations?
But before we dismiss this pleasant record of other days, yet another
extract, and we have done.
(BELLA FERMOR TO LUCY RIVERS)
"Sillery - Eight in the evening.
"Absolutely, Lucy, I will marry a savage and turn squaw (a pretty soft
name for an Indian Princess!) Never was anything so delightful as
their lives. They talk of French husbands, but commend me to an Indian
one, who lets his wife ramble five hundred miles without asking where
she is going.
"I was sitting after dinner, with a book, in a thicket of hawthorn
near the beach, when a loud laugh called my attention to the river,
when I saw a canoe of savages making to the shore.
