Except the minister and Jack Western, no one came to see poor Giles, besides Tommy Price, who had been so sadly wronged by him.  Tom often brought him his own rice and milk or apple-dumpling; and Giles, ignorant and depraved as he was, often cried out that “he thought now there must be some truth in religion, since it taught even a boy to deny himself, and to forgive an injury.”  Mr. Wilson, the next Sunday, made a moving discourse on the danger of what are called “petty offences.”  This, together with the awful death of Giles, produced such an effect, that no poacher has been able to show his head in that parish ever since.

PART III.

TAWNEY RACHEL;

OR, THE FORTUNE-TELLER.  WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF DREAMS, OMENS, AND CONJURERS

BY HANNAH MORE.

Tawney Rachel was the wife of poaching Giles.  There seemed to be a conspiracy in Giles’ whole family to maintain themselves by tricks and pilfering.  Regular labor and honest industry did not suit their idle habits.  They had a sort of genius at finding out every unlawful means to support a vagabond life.  Rachel travelled the country with a basket on her arm.  She pretended to get her bread by selling laces, cabbage-nets, ballads, and history-books, and used to buy old rags and rabbit skins.  Many honest people trade in these things, and I am sure I do not mean to say a word against honest people, let them trade in what they will.  But Rachel only made this traffic a pretence for getting admittance into farmers’ kitchens, in order to tell fortunes.

She was continually practising on the credulity of silly girls; and took advantage of their ignorance to cheat and deceive them.  Many an innocent servant has she caused to be suspected of a robbery, while she herself, perhaps, was in league with the thief.  Many a harmless maid has she brought to ruin by contriving plots and events herself, and then pretending to foretell them.  She had not, to be sure, the power of really foretelling things, because she had no power of seeing into futurity; but she had the art sometimes to bring them about according as she had foretold them.  So she got that credit for her wisdom which really belonged to her wickedness.

Rachel was also a famous interpreter of dreams, and could distinguish exactly between the fate of any two persons who happened to have a mole on the right or the left cheek.  She had a cunning way of getting herself off when any of her prophecies failed.  When she explained a dream according to the natural appearance of things, and it did not come to pass, then she would get out of that scrape by saying, that “this sort of dreams went by contraries.”  Now, of two very opposite things the chance always is, that one of them may turn out to be true; so in either case she kept up the cheat.