d no
other way being in a Korner and all Fiting and so i
up with the demmyjon which i hoap he is better And
your Petishioner will ever pray your Maggesty's
loving Subject and Servant

JON DANGEROUS.

My Granmother was a Lady of Quality and lived in
her own House in Hannover Squair and was used after
her Deth very cruelly by one Mistress Tallmash and
Kadwallader which was the Stoard and was sent in a
Waggin like a Beggar Deere Sur Mr. Gnawbit he used
me shameful wich I was Blak and Blue and the Old
Gentleman he ses you Run away ses he into Charwood
chaise and join the Blaks Deere Sur this is All
which Captain Nite would sware but as eloped I am
now lying here many weekes Deere Sur I shood like
to be hanged in Wite for I am Innocent leastways of
meaning to kill the Grannydeere."

This was a Curious kind of Schoolboy letter. Different I take it from
those one gets from a Brother, asking for a Crown, a Pony, or a
Plumcake. But my Schools had been of the hardest, and this was _my_
Holiday letter.

When the Mayor read it, he burst out a-laughing, and says that no such
Thieves' Flash must be sent to the Foot of the Throne. But Mr. Shapcott
told him that he would not have one word altered; that he would not even
strike out the paragraph where I had been irreverent enough to quote a
Text (and spell it badly); and that what I had written, and naught else,
should go to the King. He took it to London himself, and his Majesty
being much elated by some successes in Germany, and the Discovery of a
Jacobite Plot, and moved moreover by the intercession of a Foreign Lady,
that was his favourite, and who vowed that the little Deer-Stealer's
Petition was Monstrous Droll, and almost as good as a Play,--His Majesty
was graciously pleased to remit my Sentence, on condition of my
transporting myself for life to His Majesty's Plantations in North
America.

As to my transporting "myself," that was a Fiction. I was henceforth as
much a Slave to my own Countrymen as I was in after days to the Moors.
The Shapcotts would willingly have provided me with the means of going
to the uttermost ends of the World, but that was not the way the thing
was to be done. Flesh and Blood were bought and sold in those days, and
it did not much matter about the colour. By th