l
that I shall bring into this account.

I have hinted at large what I had done for my two sons, one at Messina,
and the other in the Indies; but I have not gone through the story of my
two daughters. I was so in danger of being known by one of them, that I
durst not see her, so as to let her know who I was; and for the other, I
could not well know how to see her, and own her, and let her see me,
because she must then know that I would not let her sister know me,
which would look strange; so that, upon the whole, I resolved to see
neither of them at all. But Amy managed all that for me; and when she
had made gentlewomen of them both, by giving them a good, though late
education, she had like to have blown up the whole case, and herself and
me too, by an unhappy discovery of herself to the last of them, that is,
to her who was our cook-maid, and who, as I said before, Amy had been
obliged to turn away, for fear of the very discovery which now happened.
I have observed already in what manner Amy managed her by a third
person; and how the girl, when she was set up for a lady, as above, came
and visited Amy at my lodgings; after which, Amy going, as was her
custom, to see the girl's brother (my son) at the honest man's house in
Spitalfields, both the girls were there, merely by accident, at the same
time; and the other girl unawares discovered the secret, namely, that
this was the lady that had done all this for them.

Amy was greatly surprised at it; but as she saw there was no remedy, she
made a jest of it, and so after that conversed openly, being still
satisfied that neither of them could make much of it, as long as they
knew nothing of me. So she took them together one time, and told them
the history, as she called it, of their mother, beginning at the
miserable carrying them to their aunt's; she owned she was not their
mother herself, but described her to them. However, when she said she
was not their mother, one of them expressed herself very much surprised,
for the girl had taken up a strong fancy that Amy was really her mother,
and that she had, for some particular reasons, concealed it from her;
and therefore, when she told her frankly that she was not her mother,
the girl fell a-crying, and Amy had much ado to keep life in her. This
was the girl who was at first my cook-maid in the Pall Mall. When Amy
had brought her to again a little, and she had recovered her first
disorder, Amy asked what ailed her? The poor