es, and her two agents, and I
also, presently spread a report all over, that this gentleman came to
court her; that he was a gentleman of a #1000 a year, and that he was
fallen in love with her, and that she was going to her aunt's in the
city, because it was inconvenient for the gentleman to come to her with
his coach in Redriff, the streets being so narrow and difficult.

This took immediately. The captain was laughed at in all companies,
and was ready to hang himself. He tried all the ways possible to come
at her again, and wrote the most passionate letters to her in the
world, excusing his former rashness; and in short, by great
application, obtained leave to wait on her again, as he said, to clear
his reputation.

At this meeting she had her full revenge of him; for she told him she
wondered what he took her to be, that she should admit any man to a
treaty of so much consequence as that to marriage, without inquiring
very well into his circumstances; that if he thought she was to be
huffed into wedlock, and that she was in the same circumstances which
her neighbours might be in, viz. to take up with the first good
Christian that came, he was mistaken; that, in a word, his character
was really bad, or he was very ill beholden to his neighbours; and that
unless he could clear up some points, in which she had justly been
prejudiced, she had no more to say to him, but to do herself justice,
and give him the satisfaction of knowing that she was not afraid to say
No, either to him or any man else.

With that she told him what she had heard, or rather raised herself by
my means, of his character; his not having paid for the part he
pretended to own of the ship he commanded; of the resolution of his
owners to put him out of the command, and to put his mate in his stead;
and of the scandal raised on his morals; his having been reproached
with such-and-such women, and having a wife at Plymouth and in the West
Indies, and the like; and she asked him whether he could deny that she
had good reason, if these things were not cleared up, to refuse him,
and in the meantime to insist upon having satisfaction in points to
significant as they were.

He was so confounded at her discourse that he could not answer a word,
and she almost began to believe that all was true, by his disorder,
though at the same time she knew that she had been the raiser of all
those reports herself.

After some time he recovered himself a little, a