ecome somewhat of a
Character, and (my old proficiency with the Sticks remaining by me) had
earned among the Gentlemen of the Army the cant name of Mother
Drum--that by which, to my sorrow, I am now known. And as Mother Drum,
suttler and baggage-wagon woman in the train of the great John
Churchill, I drank and swore, and sold aquavitae, and plundered when I
could, and was flogged when I was taken in the fact (for the
Provost-Marshal is no respecter of sex), at Blenheim and Ramilies, and
Malplaquet and Oudenarde, and throughout those glorious Campaigns of
which I could talk to you till doomsday. I came back to England at the
Peace of Utrecht, and set up another Tavern, and married another
husband, more worthless and more drunken than the first one, and then
went bankrupt and turned washerwoman, and then got into trouble about a
gentleman's silver-hilted Rapier, for which I lay long in hold, and was
sent for five years to the Plantations; and at last here I am, old and
fat and good for nothing, but to throw to the crows as carrion--Mother
Drum, God save us all! as bold as brass, and as tough as leather, and
'the miserablest old 'oman that ever stepped.'"

This last part of her adventures I have not polished up, and they are
Mother Drum's own.

CHAPTER THE NINTH.

THE END OF MY ADVENTURES AMONG THE BLACKS.

WERE I to give vent to that Garrulity which grows upon us Veterans with
Gout and the Gravel, and the kindred Ailments of Age, this Account of my
Life would never reach beyond the record of Boyhood. For from the first
Flower of my freshest childhood to the time that I became toward the
more serious Business of the World, I think I could set down Day by Day,
and well-nigh Hour by Hour, all the things that have occurred to me. How
is it that I preserve so keen a Remembrance of a little lad's joys and
sorrows, when I can scarcely recall how many times I have suffered
Shipwreck in later age, or tell how many Sansfoy Miscreants, caring
neither for Heaven or man a Point, I have slain? Nay, from what cause
does it proceed that I, upon whom the broken reliques of my
Schoolmaster's former Cruelty are yet Green, and who can conjure up all
the events that bore upon my Running away into Charlwood Chase, even to
the doggish names of the Blacks, their ribald talk, and the fleering of
the Women they had about them, find it sore travail to remember what I
had for dinner yesterday, what friends I conversed with, what Tavern I