the parish must keep them, if they are out of place, they must prostitute
their bodies, or starve; so that from clopping and changing, they
generally proceed to whoring and thieving, and this is the reason why our
streets swarm with strumpets.

Thus many of them rove from place to place, from bawdy-house to service,
and from service to bawdy-house again, ever unsettled and never easy,
nothing being more common than to find these creatures one week in a good
family, and the next in a brothel. This amphibious life makes them fit
for neither, for if the bawd uses them ill, away they trip to service,
and if the mistress gives them a wry word, whip they are at a bawdy-house
again, so that in effect they neither make good whores nor good servants.

Those who are not thus slippery in the tail, are light of finger; and of
these the most pernicious are those who beggar you inchmeal. If a maid
is a downright thief she strips you, it once, and you know your loss; but
these retail pilferers waste you insensibly, and though you hardly miss
it, yet your substance shall decay to such a degree, that you must have a
very good bottom indeed not to feel the ill effects of such moths in your
family.

Tea, sugar, wine, &c., or any such trifling commodities, are reckoned no
thefts, if they do not directly take your pewter from your shelf, or your
linen from your drawers, they are very honest: What harm is there, say
they, in cribbing a little matter for a junket, a merry bout or so? Nay,
there are those that when they are sent to market for one joint of meat,
shall take up two on their master's account, and leave one by the way,
for some of these maids are mighty charitable, and can make a shift to
maintain a small family with what they can purloin from their masters and
mistresses.