se, I always felt as if I was going
to be hanged when I did, and it was with difficulty I could make her
go; she called it a bad house, and it cost money. Something then occured
which helped me, penniless as I was.

At the extreme end of our village were a few little houses, one stood
with its side entrance up a road only partially formed, and without
thoroughfare; its owner was a pew-opener, her daughter a dressmaker, who
worked for servants and such like; they cut out things for servants, who
in those days largely made their own dresses. Charlotte had things made
there. At a fair held every year near us of which I shall have to tell
more, my fast friend, who had put me up to so much, and whom I forgot
to say tried to get hold of Charlotte, I saw with the dressmaker's
daughter. Said he, talking to me next day, "She is jolly ugly, but she's
good enough for a feel, I felt her cunt last night, and think she has
been fucked (he thought that of every girl), her mother's a rum old gal
too, she will let you meet a girl at her cottage, not whores, you know,
but if they are respectable." "Is it a baudy house?" I asked. "Oh no,
it's quite respectable, but if you walk in with a lady, she leaves you
in the room together, and when you come out, if you just give her half
a crown, she drops a curtesy, just as she does when she opens
the pew-doors and anyone gives her six pence, but she is quite
respectable--the clergyman goes to see her sometimes."

Charlotte asked to go out to a dressmaker, I met her as if by chance at
the door, the old pew-opener asked if I would like to walk in and wait.
I did. Charlotte came in after she had arranged about her dress. There
was a sofa in the room, and she was soon on it; we left together, I
have two or three shillings (money went much further then), and the
pew-opener said, "You can always wait here when your young lady comes to
see my daughter."

When we went a second time, she asked me if I went to St. Mary's Chapel
(her Chapel). We went to her house in the day that time. When going away
she said, "Perhaps you wont mind always going out first, for neighbours
are so ill-natured." The old woman was really a pew-opener, her daughter
really a dressmaker, but she was glad to earn a few shillings, by
letting her house be used for assignations of a quiet sort; she would
not have let gay women in, from what I heard.

She had lived for years in the parish, and was thought respectable. She
had not muc