eceit."

But Virginia did not approve of my Latin: she said, that what I had
placed at the foot of her flagstaff was too long and too learned. "I
should have liked better," added she, "to have seen inscribed, EVER
AGITATED, YET CONSTANT."--"Such a motto," I answered, "would have been
still more applicable to virtue." My reflection made her blush.

The delicacy of sentiment of these happy families was manifested in
every thing around them. They gave the tenderest names to objects
in appearance the most indifferent. A border of orange, plantain and
rose-apple trees, planted round a green sward where Virginia and Paul
sometimes danced, received the name of Concord. An old tree, beneath
the shade of which Madame de la Tour and Margaret used to recount their
misfortunes, was called the Burial-place of Tears. They bestowed the
names of Brittany and Normandy on two little plots of ground, where they
had sown corn, strawberries, and peas. Domingo and Mary, wishing, in
imitation of their mistresses, to recall to mind Angola and Foullepoint,
the places of their birth in Africa, gave those names to the little
fields where the grass was sown with which they wove their baskets,
and where they had planted a calabash-tree. Thus, by cultivating
the productions of their respective climates, these exiled families
cherished the dear illusions which bind us to our native country, and
softened their regrets in a foreign land. Alas! I have seen these trees,
these fountains, these heaps of stones, which are now so completely
overthrown,--which now, like the desolated plains of Greece, present
nothing but masses of ruin and affecting remembrances, all called into
life by the many charming appellations thus bestowed upon them!

But perhaps the most delightful spot of this enclosure was that called
Virginia's resting-place. At the foot of the rock which bore the name
of The Discovery of Friendship, is a small crevice, whence issues a
fountain, forming, near its source, a little spot of marshy soil in the
middle of a field of rich grass. At the time of Paul's birth I had made
Margaret a present of an Indian cocoa which had been given me, and which
she planted on the border of this fenny ground, in order that the tree
might one day serve to mark the epoch of her son's birth. Madame de la
Tour planted another cocoa with the same view, at the birth of Virginia.
These nuts produced two cocoa-trees, which formed the only records of
the two families;