Here my mother-in-law ran out in a long account of the wicked practices
in that dreadful place, and how it ruined more young people that all
the town besides. 'And child,' says my mother, 'perhaps you may know
little of it, or, it may be, have heard nothing about it; but depend
upon it,' says she, 'we all know here that there are more thieves and
rogues made by that one prison of Newgate than by all the clubs and
societies of villains in the nation; 'tis that cursed place,' says my
mother, 'that half peopled this colony.' Here she went on with her own story so long, and in so particular a
manner, that I began to be very uneasy; but coming to one particular
that required telling her name, I thought I should have sunk down in
the place. She perceived I was out of order, and asked me if I was not
well, and what ailed me. I told her I was so affected with the
melancholy story she had told, and the terrible things she had gone
through, that it had overcome me, and I begged of her to talk no more
of it. 'Why, my dear,' says she very kindly, 'what need these things
trouble you? These passages were long before your time, and they give
me no trouble at all now; nay, I look back on them with a particular
satisfaction, as they have been a means to bring me to this place.'
Then she went on to tell me how she very luckily fell into a good
family, where, behaving herself well, and her mistress dying, her
master married her, by whom she had my husband and his sister, and that
by her diligence and good management after her husband's death, she had
improved the plantations to such a degree as they then were, so that
most of the estate was of her getting, not her husband's, for she had
been a widow upwards of sixteen years.
I heard this part of they story with very little attention, because I
wanted much to retire and give vent to my passions, which I did soon
after; and let any one judge what must be the anguish of my mind, when
I came to reflect that this was certainly no more or less than my own
mother, and I had now had two children, and was big with another by my
own brother, and lay with him still every night.
I was now the most unhappy of all women in the world. Oh! had the
story never been told me, all had been well; it had been no crime to
have lain with my husband, since as to his being my relation I had
known nothing of it.