own rice and milk or apple-dumpling; and Giles,
ignorant and depraved as he was, often cried out that "he thought now
there must be some truth in religion, since it taught even a boy to
_deny himself_, and _to forgive an injury_." Mr. Wilson, the next
Sunday, made a moving discourse on the danger of what are called
"petty offences." This, together with the awful death of Giles,
produced such an effect, that no poacher has been able to show his
head in that parish ever since.

PART III.

TAWNEY RACHEL;

OR, THE FORTUNE-TELLER. WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF DREAMS, OMENS,
AND CONJURERS

BY HANNAH MORE.

Tawney Rachel was the wife of poaching Giles. There seemed to be a
conspiracy in Giles' whole family to maintain themselves by tricks and
pilfering. Regular labor and honest industry did not suit their idle
habits. They had a sort of genius at finding out every unlawful means
to support a vagabond life. Rachel travelled the country with a basket
on her arm. She pretended to get her bread by selling laces,
cabbage-nets, ballads, and history-books, and used to buy old rags and
rabbit skins. Many honest people trade in these things, and I am sure
I do not mean to say a word against honest people, let them trade in
what they will. But Rachel only made this traffic a pretence for
getting admittance into farmers' kitchens, in order to tell fortunes.

She was continually practising on the credulity of silly girls; and
took advantage of their ignorance to cheat and deceive them. Many an
innocent servant has she caused to be suspected of a robbery, while
she herself, perhaps, was in league with the thief. Many a harmless
maid has she brought to ruin by contriving plots and events herself,
and then pretending to foretell them. She had not, to be sure, the
power of really foretelling things, because she had no power of seeing
into futurity; but she had the art sometimes to bring them about
according as she had foretold them. So she got that credit for her
wisdom which really belonged to her wickedness.

Rachel was also a famous interpreter of dreams, and could distinguish
exactly between the fate of any two persons who happened to have a
mole on the right or the left cheek. She had a cunning way of getting
herself off when any of her prophecies failed. When she explained a
dream according to the natural appearance of things, and it did not
come to pass, then she would get out of that scrape by saying, that
"this sort of dream