gment.

But it was not so easy to replace to our community the loss of so sweet
a member of it: for, not to mention her beauty, she was one of those
mild, pliant characters, that if one does not entirely esteem, one can
scarce help loving, which is not such a bad compensation neither. Owing
all her weaknesses to good nature, and an indolent facility that kept
her too much at the mercy of first impressions, she had just sense
enough to know that she wanted leading strings, and thought herself so
much obliged to any who would take the pains to think for her, and guide
her, that with a very little management, she was capable of being made a
most agreeable, nay a most virtuous wife: for vice, it is probable, had
never been her choice, or her fate, if it had not been for occasion,
or example, or had she not depended less upon herself than upon her
circumstances. This presumption her conduct afterwards verified: for
presently meeting with a match, that was ready cut and dry for her, with
a neighbour's son of her own rank, and a young man of sense and order,
who took as the widow of one lost at sea (for so it seems one of her
gallants, whose name she had made free with, really was), she naturally
struck into all the duties of her domestic life, with as much simplicity
of affection, with as much constancy and regularity, as if she had never
swerved from a state of undebauched innocence from her youth.

These desertions had, however, now so far thinned Mrs. Cole's cluck that
she was left with only me, like a hen with one chicken; but though she
was earnestly entreated and encouraged to recruit her crops, her growing
infirmities, and, above all, the tortures, of a stubborn hip gout,
which she found would yield to no remedy, determined her to break up her
business, and retire with a decent pittance into the country, where I
promised myself, nothing so sure, as my going down to live with her, as
soon as I had seen a little more of life, and improved my small matters
into a competency that would create in me an independence on the world:
for I was now, thanks to Mrs. Cole, wise enough to keep that essential
in view.

Thus was I then to lose my faithful preceptress, as did the philosophers
of the town the white crow of her profession. For besides that she never
ransacked her customers, whose tastes too she ever studiously consulted,
she never racked her pupils with unconscionable extortions, nor ever
put their hard earnings, as she