I am glad you have your clothes.  But no money!  No books but a Spira, a Drexelius, and a Practice of Piety!  Those who sent the latter ought to have kept it for themselves—­But I must hurry myself from this subject.

You have exceedingly alarmed me by what you hint of his attempt to get one of my letters.  I am assured by my new informant, that he is the head of a gang of wretched (those he brought you among, no doubt, were some of them) who join together to betray innocent creatures, and to support one another afterwards by violence; and were he to come at the knowledge of the freedoms I take with him, I should be afraid to stir out without a guard.

I am sorry to tell you, that I have reason to think, that your brother has not laid aside his foolish plot.  A sunburnt, sailor-looking fellow was with me just now, pretending great service to you from Captain Singleton, could he be admitted to your speech.  I pleaded ignorance as to the place of your abode.  The fellow was too well instructed for me to get any thing out of him.

I wept for two hours incessantly on reading your’s, which enclosed that from your cousin Morden.* My dearest creature, do not desert yourself.  Let your Anna Howe obey the call of that friendship which has united us as one soul, and endeavour to give you consolation.

* See Letter XIX. of this volume.

I wonder not at the melancholy reflections you so often cast upon yourself in your letters, for the step you have been forced upon one hand, and tricked into on the other.  A strange fatality!  As if it were designed to show the vanity of all human prudence.  I wish, my dear, as you hint, that both you and I have not too much prided ourselves in a perhaps too conscious superiority over others.  But I will stop—­how apt are weak minds to look out for judgments in any extraordinary event!  ’Tis so far right, that it is better, and safer, and juster, to arraign ourselves, or our dearest friends, than Providence; which must always have wise ends to answer its dispensations.

But do not talk, as if one of your former, of being a warning only*—­you will be as excellent an example as ever you hoped to be, as well as a warning:  and that will make your story, to all that shall come to know it, of double efficacy:  for were it that such a merit as yours could not ensure to herself noble and generous usage from a libertine heart, who will expect any tolerable behaviour from men of his character?

* See Vol.  III.  Letter XXVIII.

If you think yourself inexcusable for taking a step that put you into the way of delusion, without any intention to go off with him, what must those giddy creatures think of themselves, who, without half your provocations and inducements, and without any regard to decorum, leap walls, drop from windows, and steal away from their parents’ house, to the seducer’s bed, in the same day?

Again, if you are so ready to accuse yourself for dispensing with the prohibitions of the most unreasonable parents, which yet were but half-prohibitions at first, what ought those to do, who wilfully shut their ears to the advice of the most reasonable; and that perhaps, where apparent ruin, or undoubted inconvenience, is the consequence of the predetermined rashness?