urn the following day to our respective habitations, we found them in
exactly the same state in which they had been left. In this island, then
unsophisticated by the pursuits of commerce, such were the honesty and
primitive manners of the population, that the doors of many houses were
without a key, and even a lock itself was an object of curiosity to not
a few of the native inhabitants.

There were, however, some days in the year celebrated by Paul and
Virginia in a more peculiar manner; these were the birth-days of their
mothers. Virginia never failed the day before to prepare some wheaten
cakes, which she distributed among a few poor white families, born
in the island, who had never eaten European bread. These unfortunate
people, uncared for by the blacks, were reduced to live on tapioca in
the woods; and as they had neither the insensibility which is the result
of slavery, nor the fortitude which springs from a liberal education,
to enable them to support their poverty, their situation was deplorable.
These cakes were all that Virginia had it in her power to give away, but
she conferred the gift in so delicate a manner as to add tenfold to
its value. In the first place, Paul was commissioned to take the cakes
himself to these families, and get their promise to come and spend the
next day at Madame de la Tour's. Accordingly, mothers of families, with
two or three thin, yellow, miserable looking daughters, so timid that
they dared not look up, made their appearance. Virginia soon put them
at their ease; she waited upon them with refreshments, the excellence
of which she endeavoured to heighten by relating some particular
circumstance which in her own estimation, vastly improved them. One
beverage had been prepared by Margaret; another, by her mother: her
brother himself had climbed some lofty tree for the very fruit she was
presenting. She would then get Paul to dance with them, nor would she
leave them till she saw that they were happy. She wished them to partake
of the joy of her own family. "It is only," she said, "by promoting the
happiness of others, that we can secure our own." When they left, she
generally presented them with some little article they seemed to fancy,
enforcing their acceptance of it by some delicate pretext, that she
might not appear to know they were in want. If she remarked that their
clothes were much tattered, she obtained her mother's permission to
give them some of her own, and then sent P