her; so that I continued extremely perplexed, melancholy, and
discouraged to the last degree.

I remained in this dejected condition near a twelvemonth. My husband had
two sisters, who were married, and lived very well, and some other near
relations that I knew of, and I hoped would do something for me; and I
frequently sent to these, to know if they could give me any account of
my vagrant creature. But they all declared to me in answer, that they
knew nothing about him; and, after frequent sending, began to think me
troublesome, and to let me know they thought so too, by their treating
my maid with very slight and unhandsome returns to her inquiries.

This grated hard, and added to my affliction; but I had no recourse but
to my tears, for I had not a friend of my own left me in the world. I
should have observed, that it was about half a year before this
elopement of my husband that the disaster I mentioned above befell my
brother, who broke, and that in such bad circumstances, that I had the
mortification to hear, not only that he was in prison, but that there
would be little or nothing to be had by way of composition.

Misfortunes seldom come alone: this was the forerunner of my husband's
flight; and as my expectations were cut off on that side, my husband
gone, and my family of children on my hands, and nothing to subsist
them, my condition was the most deplorable that words can express.

I had some plate and some jewels, as might be supposed, my fortune and
former circumstances considered; and my husband, who had never stayed to
be distressed, had not been put to the necessity of rifling me, as
husbands usually do in such cases. But as I had seen an end of all the
ready money during the long time I had lived in a state of expectation
for my husband, so I began to make away one thing after another, till
those few things of value which I had began to lessen apace, and I saw
nothing but misery and the utmost distress before me, even to have my
children starve before my face. I leave any one that is a mother of
children, and has lived in plenty and in good fashion, to consider and
reflect what must be my condition. As to my husband, I had now no hope
or expectation of seeing him any more; and indeed, if I had, he was a
man of all the men in the world the least able to help me, or to have
turned his hand to the gaining one shilling towards lessening our
distress; he neither had the capacity or the inclination; he could