Moll Flanders | Page 5

if we had been at the
dancing-school.
I was continued here till I was eight years old, when I was terrified with news that the
magistrates (as I think they called them) had ordered that I should go to service. I was

able to do but very little service wherever I was to go, except it was to run of errands and
be a drudge to some cookmaid, and this they told me of often, which put me into a great
fright; for I had a thorough aversion to going to service, as they called it (that is, to be a
servant), though I was so young; and I told my nurse, as we called her, that I believed I
could get my living without going to service, if she pleased to let me; for she had taught
me to work with my needle, and spin worsted, which is the chief trade of that city, and I
told her that if she would keep me, I would work for her, and I would work very hard.
I talked to her almost every day of working hard; and, in short, I did nothing but work
and cry all day, which grieved the good, kind woman so much, that at last she began to be
concerned for me, for she loved me very well.
One day after this, as she came into the room where all we poor children were at work,
she sat down just over against me, not in her usual place as mistress, but as if she set
herself on purpose to observe me and see me work. I was doing something she had set me
to; as I remember, it was marking some shirts which she had taken to make, and after a
while she began to talk to me. 'Thou foolish child,' says she, 'thou art always crying (for I
was crying then); 'prithee, what dost cry for?' 'Because they will take me away,' says I,
'and put me to service, and I can't work housework.' 'Well, child,' says she, 'but though
you can't work housework, as you call it, you will learn it in time, and they won't put you
to hard things at first.' 'Yes, they will,' says I, 'and if I can't do it they will beat me, and
the maids will beat me to make me do great work, and I am but a little girl and I can't do
it'; and then I cried again, till I could not speak any more to her.
This moved my good motherly nurse, so that she from that time resolved I should not go
to service yet; so she bid me not cry, and she would speak to Mr. Mayor, and I should not
go to service till I was bigger.
Well, this did not satisfy me, for to think of going to service 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 roared 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,'