Besides, the spirit of emulation would have kept up my courage, and given fire and brilliancy to my fancy.
Emily and I should have been trying who had the most lively genius at creation; who could have produced the fairest flowers; who have formed the woods and rocks into the most beautiful arbors, vistoes, grottoes; have taught the streams to flow in the most pleasing meanders; have brought into view the greatest number and variety of those lovely little falls of water with which this fairy land abounds; and shewed nature in the fairest form.
In short, we should have been continually endeavoring, following the luxuriancy of female imagination, to render more charming the sweet abodes of love and friendship; whilst our heroes, changing their swords into plough-shares, and engaged in more substantial, more profitable labors, were clearing land, raising cattle and corn, and doing every thing becoming good farmers; or, to express it more poetically,
"Taming the genius of the stubborn plain, Almost as quickly as they conquer'd Spain:"
By which I would be understood to mean the Havannah, where, vanity apart, I am told both of them did their duty, and a little more, if a man can in such a case be said to do more.
In one word, they would have been studying the useful, to support us; we the agreable, to please and amuse them; which I take to be assigning to the two sexes the employments for which nature intended them, notwithstanding the vile example of the savages to the contrary.
There are now no farmeresses in Canada worth my contending with; therefore the whole pleasure of the thing would be at an end, even on the supposition that friendship had not been the soul of our design.
Say every thing for me to Temple and Mrs. Rivers; and to my dearest Emily, if arrived.
It is very true, my Lord, that the Jesuit missionaries still continue in the Indian villages in Canada; and I am afraid it is no less true, that they use every art to instill into those people an aversion to the English; at least I have been told this by the Indians themselves, who seem equally surprized and piqued that we do not send missionaries amongst them.
Their ideas of christianity are extremely circumscribed, and they give no preference to one mode of our faith above another; they regard a missionary of any nation as a kind father, who comes to instruct them in the best way of worshiping the Deity, whom they suppose more propitious to the Europeans than to themselves; and as an ambassador from the prince whose subject he is: they therefore think it a mark of honor, and a proof of esteem, to receive missionaries; and to our remissness, and the French wise attention on this head, is owing the extreme attachment the greater part of the savage nations have ever had to the latter.