gentlewoman? What!
will you do it by your fingers' end?'

'Yes,' says I again, very innocently.

'Why, what can you earn?' says she; 'what can you get at your work?'

'Threepence,' said I, 'when I spin, and fourpence when I work plain
work.'

'Alas! poor gentlewoman,' said she again, laughing, 'what will that do
for thee?'

'It will keep me,' says I, 'if you will let me live with you.' And
this I said in such a poor petitioning tone, that it made the poor
woman's heart yearn to me, as she told me afterwards.

'But,' says she, 'that will not keep you and buy you clothes too; and
who must buy the little gentlewoman clothes?' says she, and smiled all
the while at me.

'I will work harder, then,' says I, 'and you shall have it all.'

'Poor child! it won't keep you,' says she; 'it will hardly keep you in
victuals.'

'Then I will have no victuals,' says I, again very innocently; 'let me
but live with you.'

'Why, can you live without victuals?' says she.

'Yes,' again says I, very much like a child, you may be sure, and still
I cried heartily.

I had no policy in all this; you may easily see it was all nature; but
it was joined with so much innocence and so much passion that, in
short, it set the good motherly creature a-weeping too, and she cried
at last as fast as I did, and then took me and led me out of the
teaching-room. 'Come,' says she, 'you shan't go to service; you shall
live with me'; and this pacified me for the present.

Some time after this, she going to wait on the Mayor, and talking of
such things as belonged to her business, at last my story came up, and
my good nurse told Mr. Mayor the whole tale. He was so pleased with
it, that he would call his lady and his two daughters to hear it, and
it made mirth enough among them, you may be sure.

However, not a week had passed over, but on a sudden comes Mrs.
Mayoress and her two daughters to the house to see my old nurse, and to
see her school and the children. When they had looked about them a
little, 'Well, Mrs. ----,' says the Mayoress to my nurse, 'and pray
which is the little lass that intends to be a gentlewoman?' I heard
her, and I was terribly frighted at first, though I did not know why
neither; but Mrs. Mayoress comes up to me. 'Well, miss,' says she,
'and what are you at work upon?' The word miss was a language that had
hardly been heard of in our school, and I wondered what sad name it was
she called me. However, I stood up,