seeming prosperity wore off, and ended in misery and
destruction. It was some time, indeed, before it came to this,
for, but I know not by what ill fate guided, everything went
wrong with us afterwards, and that which was worse, my
husband grew strangely altered, forward, jealous, and unkind,
and I was as impatient of bearing his carriage, as the carriage
was unreasonable and unjust. These things proceeded so far,
that we came at last to be in such ill terms with one another,
that I claimed a promise of him, which he entered willingly
into with me when I consented to come from England with
him, viz. that if I found the country not to agree with me, or
that I did not like to live there, I should come away to England
again when I pleased, giving him a year’s warning to settle
his affairs.
I say, I now claimed this promise of him, and I must confess
I did it not in the most obliging terms that could be in the
world neither; but I insisted that he treated me ill, that I was
remote from my friends, and could do myself no justice, and
that he was jealous without cause, my conversation having
been unblamable, and he having no pretense for it, and that to
remove to England would take away all occasion from him.
I insisted so peremptorily upon it, that he could not avoid
coming to a point, either to keep his word with me or to break
it; and this, notwithstanding he used all the skill he was master
of, and employed his mother and other agents to prevail with
me to alter my resolutions; indeed, the bottom of the thing lay
at my heart, and that made all his endeavours fruitless, for my
heart was alienated from him as a husband. I loathed the
thoughts of bedding with him, and used a thousand pretenses
of illness and humour to prevent his touching me, fearing
nothing more than to be with child by him, which to be sure
would have prevented, or at least delayed, my going over to
England.
However, at last I put him so out of humour, that he took up
a rash and fatal resolution; in short, I should not go to England;
and though he had promised me, yet it was an unreasonable
thing for me to desire it; that it would be ruinous to his affairs,
would unhinge his whole family, and be next to an undoing
him in the world; that therefore I ought not to desire it of him,
and that no wife in the world that valued her family and her
husband’s prosperity would insist upon such a thing.
This plunged me again, for when I considered the thing
calmly, and took my husband as he really was, a diligent,
careful man in the main work of laying up an estate for his
children, and that he knew nothing of the dreadful circumstances
that he was in, I could not but confess to myself that my
proposal was very unreasonable, and what no wife that had
the good of her family at heart would have desired.
But my discontents were of another nature; I looked upon him
no longer as a husband, but as a near relation, the son of my
own mother, and I resolved somehow or other to be clear of
him, but which way I did not know, nor did it seem possible.
It is said by the ill-natured world, of our sex, that if we are
set on a thing, it is impossible to turn us from our resolutions;
in short, I never ceased poring upon the means to bring to
pass my voyage, and came that length with my husband at last,
as to propose going without him. This provoked him to the
last degree, and he called me not only an unkind wife, but an
unnatural mother, and asked me how I could entertain such a
thought without horror, as that of leaving my two children
(for one was dead) without a mother, and to be brought up by
strangers, and never to see them more. It was true, had things