Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 2.djvu/47

 here as wild as they did in Paradise; I say nothing of the liqueurs of these islands, which are so much in esteem, and which are so agreeable, that, saving your presence, they may be called the emanations of the good God and the holy angels.

"'If I were addressing women or children, I might expatiate on all these delicacies, but I am speaking to men.

"'Sons of family, I am not ignorant of the efforts usually made by parents to restrain young people from the path which must lead to fortune; but be more rational than the papas, and particularly the mammas.

"'Do not listen to them, when they tell you that the savages eat the Europeans with only a little salt: that was all very well in the days of Christopher Columbus and Robinson Crusoe.

"'Do not listen to them, when they endeavour to terrify you about the yellow fever. The yellow fever? Gentlemen, if it was as terrible as people say, there would be nothing but hospitals in the country, and God knows that there is not a single one.

"'Doubtless they will frighten you about the climate, I am too frank not to confess it; the climate is warm, but nature is so prodigal in giving refreshments, that, in truth, we must attend to the thing, or we should not perceive it.

"'They will alarm you about the sting of the musquitoes, and the bite of rattle-snakes. But have you not slaves always about you, expressly to drive away the former; and does not the noise, of the latter sufficiently inform you of its approach?

"'They will talk to you of shipwrecks. Know that I have crossed the sea fifty-seven times; that I have again and again crossed the line; that I look on going from one pole to the other, like drinking a glass of water; and although on the ocean, there is neither wooden sledges nor nurses, I think myself more secure on board a seventy-four, than in the inside of the coach to Auxerre, or on the conveyance