out after it, and which might have fallen upon it,
and then I had been inevitably killed; but I was reserved for further
afflictions.

This accident, however, spoiled my market for that time, and I came
home to my governess very much hurt and bruised, and frighted to the
last degree, and it was a good while before she could set me upon my
feet again.

It was now a merry time of the year, and Bartholomew Fair was begun. I
had never made any walks that way, nor was the common part of the fair
of much advantage to me; but I took a turn this year into the
cloisters, and among the rest I fell into one of the raffling shops.
It was a thing of no great consequence to me, nor did I expect to make
much of it; but there came a gentleman extremely well dressed and very
rich, and as 'tis frequent to talk to everybody in those shops, he
singled me out, and was very particular with me. First he told me he
would put in for me to raffle, and did so; and some small matter coming
to his lot, he presented it to me (I think it was a feather muff); then
he continued to keep talking to me with a more than common appearance
of respect, but still very civil, and much like a gentleman.

He held me in talk so long, till at last he drew me out of the raffling
place to the shop-door, and then to a walk in the cloister, still
talking of a thousand things cursorily without anything to the purpose.
At last he told me that, without compliment, he was charmed with my
company, and asked me if I durst trust myself in a coach with him; he
told me he was a man of honour, and would not offer anything to me
unbecoming him as such. I seemed to decline it a while, but suffered
myself to be importuned a little, and then yielded.

I was at a loss in my thoughts to conclude at first what this gentleman
designed; but I found afterwards he had had some drink in his head, and
that he was not very unwilling to have some more. He carried me in the
coach to the Spring Garden, at Knightsbridge, where we walked in the
gardens, and he treated me very handsomely; but I found he drank very
freely. He pressed me also to drink, but I declined it.

Hitherto he kept his word with me, and offered me nothing amiss. We
came away in the coach again, and he brought me into the streets, and
by this time it was near ten o'clock at night, and he stopped the coach
at a house where, it seems, he was acquainted, and where they made no
scruple to show us upstairs into a room wit