ught, I took a full
jump, and found myself in the hands of a sorceress, who seemed as if she
had been long waking and employed in some incantation: I was thoroughly
frightened, and cried out; but she immediately seemed to go on in some
magical operation, and anointed me from head to foot. What they meant
I could not imagine; for there gathered a great crowd about me, crying,
'An heir! an heir!' upon which I grew a little still, and believed this
was a ceremony to be used only to great persons, and such as made them,
what they called Heirs. I lay very quiet; but the witch, for no manner
of reason or provocation in the world, takes me, and binds my head as
hard as possibly she could; then ties up both my legs, and makes me
swallow down a horrid mixture. I thought it a harsh entrance into life,
to begin with taking physic; but I was forced to it, or else must have
taken down a great instrument in which she gave it me. When I was thus
dressed, I was carried to a bedside, where a fine young lady, my mother
I wot, had like to have hugged me to death. From her they faced me
about, and there was a thing with quite another look from the rest
of the room, to whom they talked about my nose. He seemed wonderfully
pleased to see me; but I knew since, my nose belonged to another family.
That into which I was born is one of the most numerous amongst you;
therefore crowds of relations came every day to congratulate my arrival;
among others my cousin Betty, the greatest romp in nature; she whisks
me such a height over her head that I cried out for fear of falling.
She pinched me, and called me squealing chit, and threw me into a
girl's arms that was taken in to tend me. The girl was very proud of the
womanly employment of a nurse, and took upon her to strip and dress me
a-new, because I made a noise, to see what ailed me; she did so, and
stuck a pin in every joint about me. I still cried; upon which she lays
me on my face in her lap; and, to quiet me, fell a-nailing in all the
pins by clapping me on the back and screaming a lullaby. But my pain
made me exalt my voice above hers, which brought up the nurse, the witch
I first saw, and my grandmother. The girl is turned downstairs, and I
stripped again, as well to find what ailed me as to satisfy my grandam's
farther curiosity. This good old woman's visit was the cause of all my
troubles. You are to understand that I was hitherto bred by hand, and
anybody that stood next gave me pap, if I di