zed in his presence.

But is Thursday, the 29th, her uncle's anniversary, methinks thou askest?
--It is; or else the day of celebration should have been earlier still.
Three weeks ago I heard her say it was: and I have down the birthday of
every one in the family, and the wedding-day of her father and mother.
The minutest circumstances are often of great service in matters of the
last importance.

And what sayest thou now to my dream?

Who says that, sleeping and waking, I have not fine helps from somebody,
some spirit rather, as thou'lt be apt to say? But no wonder that a
Beelzebub has his devilkins to attend his call.

I can have no manner of doubt of succeeding in mother H.'s part of the
scheme; for will the lady (who resolves to throw herself into the first
house she can enter, or to bespeak the protection of the first person she
meets, and who thinks there can be no danger out of this house, equal to
what she apprehends from me in it) scruple to accept of the chariot of a
dowager, accidentally offered? and the lady's protection engaged by her
faithful Dorcas, so highly bribed to promote her escape?--And then Mrs.
H. has the air and appearance of a venerable matron, and is not such a
forbidding devil as Mrs. Sinclair.

The pretty simpleton knows nothing in the world; nor that people who have
money never want assistants in their views, be they what they will. How
else could the princes of the earth be so implicitly served as they are,
change they hands every so often, and be their purposes ever so wicked.

If I can but get her to go on with me till Wednesday next week, we shall
be settled together pretty quietly by that time. And indeed if she has
any gratitude, and has in her the least of her sex's foibles, she must
think I deserve her favour, by the pains she has cost me. For dearly do
they all love that men should take pains about them and for them.

And here, for the present, I will lay down my pen, and congratulate
myself upon my happy invention (since her obstinacy puts me once more
upon exercising it.)--But with this resolution, I think, that, if the
present contrivance fail me, I will exert all the faculties of my mind,
all my talents, to procure for myself a regal right to her favour and
that in defiance of all my antipathies to the married state; and of the
suggestions of the great devil out of the house, and of his secret agents
in it.--Since, if now she is not to be prevailed upon, or drawn in,