the cruel question, 'Whither I should go?' I had but two shillings left
in my pocket, the rest had been expended, by a poor woman who slept in
the same room, to pay for my lodging, and purchase the necessaries of
which she partook.

"With this wretch I went into the neighbouring streets to beg, and my
disconsolate appearance drew a few pence from the idle, enabling me
still to command a bed; till, recovering from my illness, and taught
to put on my rags to the best advantage, I was accosted from different
motives, and yielded to the desire of the brutes I met, with the same
detestation that I had felt for my still more brutal master. I have
since read in novels of the blandishments of seduction, but I had not
even the pleasure of being enticed into vice.

"I shall not," interrupted Jemima, "lead your imagination into all the
scenes of wretchedness and depravity, which I was condemned to view; or
mark the different stages of my debasing misery. Fate dragged me through
the very kennels of society: I was still a slave, a bastard, a common
property. Become familiar with vice, for I wish to conceal nothing from
you, I picked the pockets of the drunkards who abused me; and proved by
my conduct, that I deserved the epithets, with which they loaded me at
moments when distrust ought to cease.

"Detesting my nightly occupation, though valuing, if I may so use the
word, my independence, which only consisted in choosing the street in
which I should wander, or the roof, when I had money, in which I should
hide my head, I was some time before I could prevail on myself to accept
of a place in a house of ill fame, to which a girl, with whom I had
accidentally conversed in the street, had recommended me. I had been
hunted almost into a fever, by the watchmen of the quarter of the town I