ven say in my thoughts, I wish you would, for if you
go on thus you will starve us all.

He stayed, however, at home all that day, and lay at home that night;
early the next morning he gets out of bed, goes to a window which looked
out towards the stable, and sounds his French horn, as he called it,
which was his usual signal to call his men to go out a-hunting.

It was about the latter end of August, and so was light yet at five
o'clock, and it was about that time that I heard him and his two men go
out and shut the yard gates after them. He said nothing to me more than
as usual when he used to go out upon his sport; neither did I rise, or
say anything to him that was material, but went to sleep again after he
was gone, for two hours or thereabouts.

It must be a little surprising to the reader to tell him at once, that
after this I never saw my husband more; but, to go farther, I not only
never saw him more, but I never heard from him, or of him, neither of
any or either of his two servants, or of the horses, either what became
of them, where or which way they went, or what they did or intended to
do, no more than if the ground had opened and swallowed them all up, and
nobody had known it, except as hereafter.

I was not, for the first night or two, at all surprised, no, nor very
much the first week or two, believing that if anything evil had befallen
them, I should soon enough have heard of that; and also knowing, that as
he had two servants and three horses with him, it would be the strangest
thing in the world that anything could befall them all but that I must
some time or other hear of them.

But you will easily allow, that as time ran on, a week, two weeks, a
month, two months, and so on, I was dreadfully frighted at last, and the
more when I looked into my own circumstances, and considered the
condition in which I was left with five children, and not one farthing
subsistence for them, other than about seventy pounds in money, and what
few things of value I had about me, which, though considerable in
themselves, were yet nothing to feed a family, and for a length of time
too.

[Illustration: THE BREWER AND HIS MEN

I heard him and his two men go out and shut the yard gates after them]

What to do I knew not, nor to whom to have recourse: to keep in the
house where I was, I could not, the rent being too great; and to leave
it without his orders, if my husband should return, I could not think of
that neit