ing the contagion in the life-blood
of his posterity.

Would such gentlemen but consider the contemptible thoughts which the
very women they are concerned with, in such cases as these, have of
them, it would be a surfeit to them. As I said above, they value not
the pleasure, they are raised by no inclination to the man, the passive
jade thinks of no pleasure but the money; and when he is, as it were,
drunk in the ecstasies of his wicked pleasure, her hands are in his
pockets searching for what she can find there, and of which he can no
more be sensible in the moment of his folly that he can forethink of it
when he goes about it.

I knew a woman that was so dexterous with a fellow, who indeed deserved
no better usage, that while he was busy with her another way, conveyed
his purse with twenty guineas in it out of his fob-pocket, where he had
put it for fear of her, and put another purse with gilded counters in
it into the room of it. After he had done, he says to her, 'Now han't
you picked my pocket?' She jested with him, and told him she supposed
he had not much to lose; he put his hand to his fob, and with his
fingers felt that his purse was there, which fully satisfied him, and
so she brought off his money. And this was a trade with her; she kept
a sham gold watch, that is, a watch of silver gilt, and a purse of
counters in her pocket to be ready on all such occasions, and I doubt
not practiced it with success.

I came home with this last booty to my governess, and really when I
told her the story, it so affected her that she was hardly able to
forbear tears, to know how such a gentleman ran a daily risk of being
undone every time a glass of wine got into his head.

But as to the purchase I got, and how entirely I stripped him, she told
me it pleased her wonderfully. 'Nay child,' says she, 'the usage may,
for aught I know, do more to reform him than all the sermons that ever
he will hear in his life.' And if the remainder of the story be true,
so it did.

I found the next day she was wonderful inquisitive about this
gentleman; the description I had given her of him, his dress, his
person, his face, everything concurred to make her think of a gentleman
whose character she knew, and family too. She mused a while, and I
going still on with the particulars, she starts up; says she, 'I'll lay
#100 I know the gentleman.'

'I am sorry you do,' says I, 'for I would not have him exposed on any
account in the wor