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chair; for I could get no farther a good while.
I leave all these things to your reflection, my dear parents but I can
write no more. My poor heart's almost broken! Indeed it is--O when
shall I get away!--Send me, good God, in safety, once more to my poor
father's peaceful cot!--and there the worst that can happen will be joy
in perfection to what I now bear!--O pity
Your distressed DAUGHTER.
LETTER XXIX
MY DEAR FATHER AND MOTHER,
I must write on, though I shall come so soon; for now I have hardly any
thing else to do. I have finished all that lay upon me, and only wait
the good time of setting out. Mrs. Jervis said, I must be low in pocket,
for what I had laid out; and so would have presented me with two guineas
of her five; but I could not take them of her, because, poor gentlewoman,
she pays old debts for her children, that were extravagant, and wants
them herself. This, though, was very good in her.
I am sorry I shall have but little to bring with me; but I know you
won't, you are so good!--and I will work the harder, when I come home, if
I can get a little plain-work, or any thing, to do. But all your
neighbourhood is so poor, that I fear I shall want work, except, may be,
dame Mumford can help me to something, from any good family she is
acquainted with.
Here, what a sad thing it is! I have been brought up wrong, as matters
stand. For, you know, my good lady, now in heaven, loved singing and
dancing; and, as she would have it, I had a voice, she made me learn
both; and often and often has she made me sing her an innocent song, and
a good psalm too, and dance before her. And I must learn to flower and
draw too, and to work fine work with my needle; why, all this too I have
got pretty tolerably at my finger's end, as they say; and she used to
praise me, and was a good judge of such matters.
Well now, what is all this to the purpose, as things have turned about?
Why, no more nor less, than that I am like the grasshopper in the fable,
which I have read of in my lady's book, as follows:--[See the Aesop's
Fables which have lately been selected and reformed from those of Sir R.
L'Estrange, and the most eminent mythologists.]
'As the ants were airing their provisions one winter, a hungry
grasshopper (as suppose it was poor I) begged a charity of them. They
told him, That he should have wrought in summer, if he would not have
wanted in winter. Well, says the grasshopper, but I was not idle
neither; for I sung out the whole season. Nay, then, said they, you'll
e'en do well to make a merry year of it, and dance in winter to the time
you sung in summer.'
So I shall make a fine figure with my singing and my dancing, when I come
home to you! Nay, I shall be unfit even for a May-day holiday-time; for
these minuets, rigadoons, and French dances, that I have been practising,
will make me but ill company for my milk-maid companions that are to be.
To be sure I had better, as things stand, have learned to wash and scour,
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