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.