to bleach, and when I entered, always found the women spinning or
knitting.

A mistaken tenderness, however, for their children, makes them even
in summer load them with flannels, and having a sort of natural
antipathy to cold water, the squalid appearance of the poor babes,
not to speak of the noxious smell which flannel and rugs retain,
seems a reply to a question I had often asked--Why I did not see
more children in the villages I passed through? Indeed the children
appear to be nipt in the bud, having neither the graces nor charms
of their age. And this, I am persuaded, is much more owing to the
ignorance of the mothers than to the rudeness of the climate.
Rendered feeble by the continual perspiration they are kept in,
whilst every pore is absorbing unwholesome moisture, they give them,
even at the breast, brandy, salt fish, and every other crude
substance which air and exercise enables the parent to digest.

The women of fortune here, as well as everywhere else, have nurses
to suckle their children; and the total want of chastity in the
lower class of women frequently renders them very unfit for the
trust.

You have sometimes remarked to me the difference of the manners of
the country girls in England and in America; attributing the reserve
of the former to the climate--to the absence of genial suns. But it
must be their stars, not the zephyrs, gently stealing on their
senses, which here lead frail women astray. Who can look at these
rocks, and allow the voluptuousness of nature to be an excuse for
gratifying the desires it inspires? We must therefore, find some
other cause beside voluptuousness, I believe, to account for the