The rest of the gentlemen seeing us striving cried, 'Give it her all';

but I absolutely refused that. Then one of them said, 'D--n ye, jack,

halve it with her; don't you know you should be always upon even terms

with the ladies.' So, in short, he divided it with me, and I brought

away thirty guineas, besides about forty-three which I had stole

privately, which I was sorry for afterward, because he was so generous.

Thus I brought home seventy-three guineas, and let my old governess see

what good luck I had at play. However, it was her advice that I should

not venture again, and I took her counsel, for I never went there any

more; for I knew as well as she, if the itch of play came in, I might

soon lose that, and all the rest of what I had got.

Fortune had smiled upon me to that degree, and I had thriven so much,

and my governess too, for she always had a share with me, that really

the old gentlewoman began to talk of leaving off while we were well,

and being satisfied with what we had got; but, I know not what fate

guided me, I was as backward to it now as she was when I proposed it to

her before, and so in an ill hour we gave over the thoughts of it for

the present, and, in a word, I grew more hardened and audacious than

ever, and the success I had made my name as famous as any thief of my

sort ever had been at Newgate, and in the Old Bailey.

I had sometime taken the liberty to play the same game over again,

which is not according to practice, which however succeeded not amiss;

but generally I took up new figures, and contrived to appear in new

shapes every time I went abroad.

It was not a rumbling time of the year, and the gentlemen being most of

them gone out of town, Tunbridge, and Epsom, and such places were full

of people. But the city was thin, and I thought our trade felt it a

little, as well as other; so that at the latter end of the year I

joined myself with a gang who usually go every year to Stourbridge

Fair, and from thence to Bury Fair, in Suffolk. We promised ourselves

great things there, but when I came to see how things were, I was weary

of it presently; for except mere picking of pockets, there was little

worth meddling with; neither, if a booty had been made, was it so easy

carrying it off, nor was there such a variety of occasion for business

in our way, as in London; all that I made of the whole journey was a

gold watch at Bury Fair, and a small parcel of linen at Cambridge,

which gave me an occasion to take leave of the place. It was on old

bite, and I thought might do with a country shopkeeper, though in

London it would not.




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