committed a great many petty thieveries in the houses where they
were employed; and some of them were publicly whipped for it, when
perhaps they ought rather to have been hanged for examples,[142] for
numbers of houses were robbed on these occasions; till at length the
parish officers were sent to recommend nurses to the sick, and always
took an account who it was they sent, so as that they might call them to
account if the house had been abused where they were placed.

But these robberies extended chiefly to wearing-clothes, linen, and what
rings or money they could come at, when the person died who was under
their care, but not to a general plunder of the houses. And I could give
you an account of one of these nurses, who several years after, being on
her deathbed, confessed with the utmost horror the robberies she had
committed at the time of her being a nurse, and by which she had
enriched herself to a great degree. But as for murders, I do not find
that there was ever any proofs of the fact in the manner as it has been
reported, except as above.

They did tell me, indeed, of a nurse in one place that laid a wet cloth
upon the face of a dying patient whom she tended, and so put an end to
his life, who was just expiring before; and another that smothered a
young woman she was looking to, when she was in a fainting fit, and
would have come to herself; some that killed them by giving them one
thing, some another, and some starved them by giving them nothing at
all. But these stories had two marks of suspicion that always attended
them, which caused me always to slight them, and to look on them as mere
stories that people continually frighted one another with: (1) That
wherever it was that we heard it, they always placed the scene at the
farther end of the town, opposite or most remote from where you were to
hear it. If you heard it in Whitechapel, it had happened at St.
Giles's, or at Westminster, or Holborn, or that end of the town; if you
heard it at that end of the town, then it was done in Whitechapel, or
the Minories, or about Cripplegate Parish; if you heard of it in the
city, why, then, it happened in Southwark; and, if you heard of it in
Southwark, then it was done in the city; and the like.

In the next place, of whatsoever part you heard the story, the
particulars were always the same, especially that of laying a wet double
clout[143] on a dying man's face, and that of smothering a young
gentlewoman: so th