country, and they go to work to clear and cure the land, and
then to plant it with tobacco and corn for their own use; and
as the tradesmen and merchants will trust them with tools and
clothes and other necessaries, upon the credit of their crop
before it is grown, so they again plant every year a little more
than the year before, and so buy whatever they want with the
crop that is before them.
‘Hence, child,’ says she, ‘man a Newgate-bird becomes a great
man, and we have,’ continued she, ‘several justices of the peace,
officers of the trained bands, and magistrates of the towns they
live in, that have been burnt in the hand.’
She was going on with that part of the story, when her own
part in it interrupted her, and with a great deal of good-humoured
confidence she told me she was one of the second sort of
inhabitants herself; that she came away openly, having ventured
too far in a particular case, so that she was become a criminal.
‘And here’s the mark of it, child,’ says she; and, pulling off her
glove, ‘look ye here,’ says she, turning up the palm of her
hand, and showed me a very fine white arm and hand, but
branded in the inside of the hand, as in such cases it must be.
This story was very moving to me, but my mother, smiling,
said, ‘You need not thing a thing strange, daughter, for as I
told you, some of the best men in this country are burnt in the
hand, and they are not ashamed to own it. There’s Major —-,’
says she, ‘he was an eminent pickpocket; there’s Justice Ba—-r,
was a shoplifter, and both of them were burnt in the hand; and
I could name you several such as they are.’
We had frequent discourses of this kind, and abundance of
instances she gave me of the like. After some time, as she was
telling some stories of one that was transported but a few
weeks ago, I began in an intimate kind of way to ask her to
tell me something of her own story, which she did with the
utmost plainness and sincerity; how she had fallen into very ill
company in London in her young days, occasioned by her
mother sending her frequently to carry victuals and other relief
to a kinswoman of hers who was a prisoner in Newgate, and
who lay in a miserable starving condition, was afterwards
condemned to be hanged, but having got respite by pleading
her belly, dies afterwards in the prison.
Here my mother-in-law ran out in a long account of the wicked
practices in that dreadful place, and how it ruined more young
people that all the town besides. ‘And child,’ says my mother,
‘perhaps you may know little of it, or, it may be, have heard
nothing about it; but depend upon it,’ says she, ‘we all know
here that there are more thieves and rogues made by that one
prison of Newgate than by all the clubs and societies of villains
in the nation; ’tis that cursed place,’ says my mother, ‘that half
peopled this colony.’
Here she went on with her own story so long, and in so particular
a manner, that I began to be very uneasy; but coming to one
particular that required telling her name, I thought I should
have sunk down in the place. She perceived I was out of
order, and asked me if I was not well, and what ailed me. I
told her I was so affected with the melancholy story she had
told, and the terrible things she had gone through, that it had
overcome me, and I begged of her to talk no more of it. ‘Why,
my dear,’ says she very kindly, ‘what need these things trouble
you? These passages were long before your time, and they
give me no trouble at all now; nay, I look back on them with
a particular satisfaction, as they have been a means to bring
me to this place.’ Then she went on to tell me how she very
luckily fell into a good family, where, behaving herself well,