Och! it's a bad village that, and if I
had known what it was I would have avoided it, or run straight through
it, though I saw all the card-playing in the world going on in it. There
is a proverb about it, as I was afterwards told, old as the time of the
Moors, which holds good to the present day--it is, that in Torre Lodones
there are twenty-four housekeepers, and twenty-five thieves, maning that
all the people are thaives, and the clergyman to boot, who is not
reckoned a housekeeper; and troth I found the clergyman the greatest
thaif of the lot. After being cast out of that village I travelled for
nearly a month, subsisting by begging tolerably well, for though most of
the Spaniards are thaives, they are rather charitable; but though
charitable thaives they do not like their own being taken from them
without leave being asked, as I found to my cost; for on my entering a
garden near Seville, without leave, to take an orange, the labourer came
running up and struck me to the ground with a hatchet, giving me a big
wound in the arm. I fainted with loss of blood, and on my reviving I
found myself in a hospital at Seville, to which the labourer and the
people of the village had taken me. I should have died of starvation in
that hospital had not some English people heard of me and come to see me;
they tended me with food till I was cured, and then paid my passage on
board a ship to London, to which place the ship carried me.

'And now I was in London with five shillings in my pocket--all I had in
the world--and that did not last for long; and when it was gone I begged
in the streets, but I did not get much by that, except a month's hard
labour in the correction-house; and when I came out I knew not what to
do, but thought I would take a walk in the country, for it was
spring-time, and the weather was fine, so I took a walk about seven miles
from London, and came to a place where a great fair was being held; and
there I begged, but got nothing but a halfpenny, and was thinking of
going farther, when I saw a man with a table, like that of mine, playing
with thimbles, as you saw me. I looked at the play, and saw him win
money and run away, and hunted by constables more than once. I kept
following the man, and at last entered into conversation with him, and
learning from him that he was in want of a companion to help him, I
offered to help him if he would pay me; he looked at me from top to toe,
and did not wish at first t