and your learning, and am willing to do you any pleasure in the way
of words or conversation. Mine is not a very happy story, but as
you wish to hear it, it is quite at your service. Launcelot Lovell
made me an offer, as you call it, and we were married in Roman
fashion; that is, we gave each other our right hands, and promised
to be true to each other. We lived together two years, travelling
sometimes by ourselves, sometimes with our relations; I bore him
two children, both of which were still-born, partly, I believe,
from the fatigue I underwent in running about the country telling
dukkerin when I was not exactly in a state to do so, and partly
from the kicks and blows which my husband Launcelot was in the
habit of giving me every night, provided I came home with less than
five shillings, which it is sometimes impossible to make in the
country, provided no fair or merry-making is going on. At the end
of two years my husband, Launcelot, whistled a horse from a
farmer's field, and sold it for forty-pounds; and for that horse he
was taken, put in prison, tried, and condemned to be sent to the
other country for life. Two days before he was to be sent away, I
got leave to see him in the prison, and in the presence of the
turnkey I gave him a thin cake of gingerbread, in which there was a
dainty saw which could cut through iron. I then took on
wonderfully, turned my eyes inside out, fell down in a seeming fit,
and was carried out of the prison. That same night my husband
sawed his irons off, cut through the bars of his window, and
dropping down a height of fifty feet, lighted on his legs, and came
and joined me on a heath where I was camped alone. We were just
getting things ready to be off, when we heard people coming, and
sure enough they were runners after my husband, Launcelot Lovell;
for his escape had been discovered within a quarter of an hour
after he had got away. My husband, without bidding me farewell,