ke me, of
six-and-twenty years of wickedness, without the least signals of
remorse, without any signs of repentance, or without so much as a wish
to put an end to it; I had so long habituated myself to a life of vice,
that really it appeared to be no vice to me. I went on smooth and
pleasant, I wallowed in wealth, and it flowed in upon me at such a rate,
having taken the frugal measures that the good knight directed, so that
I had at the end of the eight years two thousand eight hundred pounds
coming yearly in, of which I did not spend one penny, being maintained
by my allowance from my Lord ----, and more than maintained by above
L200 per annum; for though he did not contract for L500 a year, as I
made dumb signs to have it be, yet he gave me money so often, and that
in such large parcels, that I had seldom so little as seven to eight
hundred pounds a year of him, one year with another.

[Illustration: THE DUTCH MERCHANT CALLS ON ROXANA

_"There," says she (ushering him in), "is the person who, I suppose,
thou inquirest for"_

PAGE 338]

I must go back here, after telling openly the wicked things I did, to
mention something which, however, had the face of doing good. I
remembered that when I went from England, which was fifteen years
before, I had left five little children, turned out as it were to the
wide world, and to the charity of their father's relations; the eldest
was not six years old, for we had not been married full seven years when
their father went away.

After my coming to England I was greatly desirous to hear how things
stood with them, and whether they were all alive or not, and in what
manner they had been maintained; and yet I resolved not to discover
myself to them in the least, or to let any of the people that had the
breeding of them up know that there was such a body left in the world as
their mother.

Amy was the only body I could trust with such a commission, and I sent
her into Spitalfields, to the old aunt and to the poor woman that were
so instrumental in disposing the relations to take some care of the
children, but they were both gone, dead and buried some years. The next
inquiry she made was at the house where she carried the poor children,
and turned them in at the door. When she came there she found the house
inhabited by other people, so that she could make little or nothing of
her inquiries, and came back with an answer that indeed was no answer to
me, for it gave me no satisf