her and her fortune, was shut up, and her father forbid him the
house. Also in one place more where he went, the woman had
the courage, however strange it was, to say No; and he could
try nowhere but he was reproached with his pride, and that he
pretended not to give the women leave to inquire into his
character, and the like.
Well, by this time he began to be sensible of his mistake; and
having alarmed all the women on that side of the water, he
went over to Ratcliff, and got access to some of the ladies
there; but though the young women there too were, according
to the fate of the day, pretty willing to be asked, yet such was
his ill-luck, that his character followed him over the water and
his good name was much the same there as it was on our side;
so that though he might have had wives enough, yet it did not
happen among the women that had good fortunes, which was
what he wanted.
But this was not all; she very ingeniously managed another
thing herself, for she got a young gentleman, who as a relation,
and was indeed a married man, to come and visit her two or
three times a week in a very fine chariot and good liveries, and
her two agents, and I also, presently spread a report all over,
that this gentleman came to court her; that he was a gentleman
of a #1000 a year, and that he was fallen in love with her, and
that she was going to her aunt’s in the city, because it was
inconvenient for the gentleman to come to her with his coach
in Redriff, the streets being so narrow and difficult.
This took immediately. The captain was laughed at in all
companies, and was ready to hang himself. He tried all the
ways possible to come at her again, and wrote the most
passionate letters to her in the world, excusing his former
rashness; and in short, by great application, obtained leave to
wait on her again, as he said, to clear his reputation.
At this meeting she had her full revenge of him; for she told
him she wondered what he took her to be, that she should
admit any man to a treaty of so much consequence as that to
marriage, without inquiring very well into his circumstances;
that if he thought she was to be huffed into wedlock, and that
she was in the same circumstances which her neighbours might
be in, viz. to take up with the first good Christian that came,
he was mistaken; that, in a word, his character was really bad,
or he was very ill beholden to his neighbours; and that unless
he could clear up some points, in which she had justly been
prejudiced, she had no more to say to him, but to do herself
justice, and give him the satisfaction of knowing that she was
not afraid to say No, either to him or any man else.
With that she told him what she had heard, or rather raised
herself by my means, of his character; his not having paid for
the part he pretended to own of the ship he commanded; of
the resolution of his owners to put him out of the command,
and to put his mate in his stead; and of the scandal raised on
his morals; his having been reproached with such-and-such
women, and having a wife at Plymouth and in the West Indies,
and the like; and she asked him whether he could deny that she
had good reason, if these things were not cleared up, to refuse
him, and in the meantime to insist upon having satisfaction in
points to significant as they were.
He was so confounded at her discourse that he could not
answer a word, and she almost began to believe that all was
true, by his disorder, though at the same time she knew that
she had been the raiser of all those reports herself.
After some time he recovered himself a little, and from that
time became the most humble, the most modest, and most