put to nurse, as they call it, to a woman who was indeed poor
but had been in better circumstances, and who got a little
livelihood by taking such as I was supposed to be, and keeping
them with all necessaries, till they were at a certain age, in
which it might be supposed they might go to service or get
their own bread.
This woman had also had a little school, which she kept to
teach children to read and to work; and having, as I have said,
lived before that in good fashion, she bred up the children she
took with a great deal of art, as well as with a great deal of care.
But that which was worth all the rest, she bred them up very
religiously, being herself a very sober, pious woman, very house-
wifely and clean, and very mannerly, and with good behaviour.
So that in a word, expecting a plain diet, coarse lodging, and
mean clothes, we were brought up as mannerly and as genteelly
as if we had been at the dancing-school.
I was continued here till I was eight years old, when I was
terrified with news that the magistrates (as I think they called
them) had ordered that I should go to service. I was able to
do but very little service wherever I was to go, except it was
to run of errands and be a drudge to some cookmaid, and this
they told me of often, which put me into a great fright; for I
had a thorough aversion to going to service, as they called it
(that is, to be a servant), though I was so young; and I told my
nurse, as we called her, that I believed I could get my living
without going to service, if she pleased to let me; for she had
taught me to work with my needle, and spin worsted, which
is the chief trade of that city, and I told her that if she would
keep me, I would work for her, and I would work very hard.
I talked to her almost every day of working hard; and, in short,
I did nothing but work and cry all day, which grieved the good,
kind woman so much, that at last she began to be concerned
for me, for she loved me very well.
One day after this, as she came into the room where all we
poor children were at work, she sat down just over against me,
not in her usual place as mistress, but as if she set herself on
purpose to observe me and see me work. I was doing something
she had set me to; as I remember, it was marking some shirts
which she had taken to make, and after a while she began to
talk to me. ‘Thou foolish child,’ says she, ‘thou art always
crying (for I was crying then); ‘prithee, what dost cry for?’
‘Because they will take me away,’ says I, ‘and put me to service,
and I can’t work housework.’ ‘Well, child,’ says she, ‘but
though you can’t work housework, as you call it, you will learn
it in time, and they won’t put you to hard things at first.’ ‘Yes,
they will,’ says I, ‘and if I can’t do it they will beat me, and the
maids will beat me to make me do great work, and I am but a
little girl and I can’t do it’; and then I cried again, till I could
not speak any more to her.
This moved my good motherly nurse, so that she from that
time resolved I should not go to service yet; so she bid me not
cry, and she would speak to Mr. Mayor, and I should not go to
service till I was bigger.
Well, this did not satisfy me, for to think of going to service
was such a frightful thing to me, that if she had assured me I
should not have gone till I was twenty years old, it would have
been the same to me; I should have cried, I believe, all the
time, with the very apprehension of its being to be so at last.