to trades or to
services, so as to be well able to provide for themselves by an honest,
industrious behaviour.

Had this been the custom in our country, I had not been left a poor
desolate girl without friends, without clothes, without help or helper
in the world, as was my fate; and by which I was not only exposed to
very great distresses, even before I was capable either of
understanding my case or how to amend it, but brought into a course of
life which was not only scandalous in itself, but which in its ordinary
course tended to the swift destruction both of soul and body.

But the case was otherwise here. My mother was convicted of felony for
a certain petty theft scarce worth naming, viz. having an opportunity
of borrowing three pieces of fine holland of a certain draper in
Cheapside. The circumstances are too long to repeat, and I have heard
them related so many ways, that I can scarce be certain which is the
right account.

However it was, this they all agree in, that my mother pleaded her
belly, and being found quick with child, she was respited for about
seven months; in which time having brought me into the world, and being
about again, she was called down, as they term it, to her former
judgment, but obtained the favour of being transported to the
plantations, and left me about half a year old; and in bad hands, you
may be sure.

This is too near the first hours of my life for me to relate anything
of myself but by hearsay; it is enough to mention, that as I was born
in such an unhappy place, I had no parish to have recourse to for my
nourishment in my infancy; nor can I give the least account how I was
kept alive, other than that, as I have been told, some relation of my
mother's took me away for a while as a nurse, but at whose expense, or
by whose direction, I know nothing at all of it.

The first account that I can recollect, or could ever learn of myself,
was that I had wandered among a crew of those people they call gypsies,
or Egyptians; but I believe it was but a very little while that I had
been among them, for I had not had my skin discoloured or blackened, as
they do very young to all the children they carry about with them; nor
can I tell how I came among them, or how I got from them.

It was at Colchester, in Essex, that those people left me; and I have a
notion in my head that I left them there (that is, that I hid myself
and would not go any farther with them), but I am not able to