are good and true, as pious as the saints themselves, although they do
not belong to the Church,--a thing which I am sorry for; but then let
us hope, that, if the world is wide, heaven is wider, and that all
worthy people will find room at last. This is Virginie's own little,
pet, private heresy; and when I tell it to the Abbe, he only smiles;
and so I think, somehow, that it is not so very bad as it might be.

"We have had a very gay life in Philadelphia, and now I am growing
tired of the world, and think I shall retire to my cheese, like
Lafontaine's rat.

"These people in the country here in America have a character quite
their own, very different from the life of cities, where one sees, for
the most part, only a continuation of the forms of good society which
exist in the Old World.

"In the country, these people seem simple, grave, severe, always
industrious, and, at first, cold and reserved in their manners towards
each other, but with great warmth of heart. They are all obedient to
the word of their minister, who lives among them just like any other
man, and marries and has children.

"Everything in their worship is plain and austere; their churches are
perfectly desolate; they have no chants, no pictures, no
carvings,--only a most disconsolate, bare-looking building, where they
meet together, and sing one or two hymns, and the minister makes one or
two prayers, all out of his own thoughts, and then gives them a long,
long discourse about things which I cannot understand enough English to
comprehend.