found us out a convenient
storehouse for our goods, and lodging for ourselves and our servants;
and about two months or thereabouts afterwards, by his direction, we
took up a large piece of land from the governor of that country, in
order to form our plantation, and so we laid the thoughts of going to
Caroline wholly aside, having been very well received here, and
accommodated with a convenient lodging till we could prepare things,
and have land enough cleared, and timber and materials provided for
building us a house, all which we managed by the direction of the
Quaker; so that in one year's time we had nearly fifty acres of land
cleared, part of it enclosed, and some of it planted with tabacco,
though not much; besides, we had garden ground and corn sufficient to
help supply our servants with roots and herbs and bread.

And now I persuaded my husband to let me go over the bay again, and
inquire after my friends. He was the willinger to consent to it now,
because he had business upon his hands sufficient to employ him,
besides his gun to divert him, which they call hunting there, and which
he greatly delighted in; and indeed we used to look at one another,
sometimes with a great deal of pleasure, reflecting how much better
that was, not than Newgate only, but than the most prosperous of our
circumstances in the wicked trade that we had been both carrying on.

Our affair was in a very good posture; we purchased of the proprietors
of the colony as much land for #35, paid in ready money, as would make
a sufficient plantation to employ between fifty and sixty servants, and
which, being well improved, would be sufficient to us as long as we
could either of us live; and as for children, I was past the prospect
of anything of that kind.

But out good fortune did not end here. I went, as I have said, over
the bay, to the place where my brother, once a husband, lived; but I
did not go to the same village where I was before, but went up another
great river, on the east side of the river Potomac, called Rappahannock
River, and by this means came on the back of his plantation, which was
large, and by the help of a navigable creek, or little river, that ran
into the Rappahannock, I came very near it.

I was now fully resolved to go up point-blank to my brother (husband),
and to tell him who I was; but not knowing what temper I might find him
in, or how much out of temper rather, I might make him by such a rash
visit, I resol