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 Paul to leave them, secretly at
their cottage doors. She thus followed the divine precept,--concealing
the benefactor, and revealing only the benefit.

You Europeans, whose minds are imbued from infancy with prejudices at
variance with happiness, cannot imagine all the instruction and pleasure
to be derived from nature. Your souls, confined to a small sphere of
intelligence, soon reach the limit of its artificial enjoyments: but
nature and the heart are inexhaustible. Paul and Virginia had neither
clock, nor almanack, nor books of chronology, history or philosophy.
The periods of their lives were regulated by those of the operations of
nature, and their familiar conversation had a reference to the changes
of the seasons. They knew the time of day by the shadows of the trees;
the seasons, by the times when those trees bore flowers or fruit;