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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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<- Previous | First | Next -> was such a frightful thing to me, that if she had assured me I should not have gone till I was twenty years old, it would have been the same to me; I should have cried, I believe, all the time, with the very apprehension of its being to be so at last. When she saw that I was not pacified yet, she began to be angry with me. 'And what would you have?' says she; 'don't I tell you that you shall not go to service till your are bigger?' 'Ay,' said I, 'but then I must go at last.' 'Why, what?' said she; 'is the girl mad? What would you be -- a gentlewoman?' 'Yes,' says I, and cried heartily till I roard out again. This set the old gentlewoman a-laughing at me, as you may be sure it would. 'Well, madam, forsooth,' says she, gibing at me, 'you would be a gentlewoman; and pray how will you come to be a gentlewoman? What! will you do it by your fingers' end?' 'Yes,' says I again, very innocently. 'Why, what can you earn?' says she; 'what can you get at your work?' 'Threepence,' said I, 'when I spin, and fourpence when I work plain work.' 'Alas! poor gentlewoman,' said she again, laughing, 'what will that do for thee?' 'It will keep me,' says I, 'if you will let me live with you.' And this I said in such a poor petitioning tone, that it made the poor woman's heart yearn to me, as she told me afterwards. 'But,' says she, 'that will not keep you and buy you clothes too; and who must buy the little gentlewoman clothes?' says she, and smiled all the while at me. 'I will work harder, then,' says I, 'and you shall have it all.' 'Poor child! it won't keep you,' says she; 'it will hardly keep you in victuals.' 'Then I will have no victuals,' says I, again very innocently; 'let me but live with you.' 'Why, can you live without victuals?' says she. |
