s he persuaded the young ladies to drop their English
acquaintances, whose place he supplied with Italians, chiefly females.
My poor old governor would not have had a person to speak to, for he
never could learn the language, but for two or three Englishmen who used
to come occasionally and take a bottle with him, in a summer-house, whose
company he could not be persuaded to resign, notwithstanding the
entreaties of his daughters, instigated by the priest, whose grand
endeavour seemed to be to render the minds of all three foolish, for his
own ends. And if he was busy above stairs with the governor, there was
another busy below with us poor English servants, a kind of subordinate
priest, a low Italian; as he could speak no language but his own, he was
continually jabbering to us in that, and by hearing him the maids and
myself contrived to pick up a good deal of the language, so that we
understood most that was said, and could speak it very fairly; and the
themes of his jabber were the beauty and virtues of one whom he called
Holy Mary, and the power and grandeur of one whom he called the Holy
Father; and he told us that we should shortly have an opportunity of
seeing the Holy Father, who could do anything he liked with Holy Mary: in
the mean time we had plenty of opportunities of seeing Holy Mary, for in
every church, chapel, and convent to which we were taken, there was an
image of Holy Mary, who, if the images were dressed at all in her
fashion, must have been very fond of short petticoats and tinsel, and
who, if those said figures at all resembled her in face, could scarcely
have been half as handsome as either of my two fellow-servants, not to
speak of the young ladies.

"Now it happened that one of the female servants was much taken with what
she saw and heard, and gave herself up entirely to the will of the
subordinate, who had quite as much dominion over her as his superior had
over the ladies; the other maid, however, the one who had a kind of
respect for me, was not so easily besotted; she used to laugh at what she
saw, and at what the fellow told her, and from her I learnt that amongst
other things intended by these priestly confederates was robbery; she
said that the poor old governor had already been persuaded by his
daughters to put more than a thousand pounds into the superior priest's
hands for purposes of charity and religion, as was said, and that the
subordinate one had already inveigled her fellow-se