In the meantime the pawnbroker to whom she had sold the silver cup, which she had stolen from poor Sally’s master, impeached her; and as the robbery was fully proved upon Rachel, she was sentenced for this crime to Botany Bay; and a happy day it was for the county of Somerset, when such a nuisance was sent out of it.  She was transported much about the same time that her husband Giles lost his life, in stealing the net from the garden wall, as related in the second part of Poaching Giles.

I have thought it my duty to print this little history, as a kind of warning to all young men and maidens, not to have any thing to say to cheats, impostors, cunning women, fortune-tellers, conjurers, and interpreters of dreams.  Listen to me, your true friend, when I assure you that God never reveals to weak and wicked women those secret designs of his providence, which no human wisdom is able to foresee.  To consult these false oracles is not only foolish, but sinful.  It is foolish, because they are themselves as ignorant as those whom they pretend to teach; and it is sinful, because it is prying into that futurity which God, in mercy as well as wisdom, hides from men.

God indeed orders all things; but when you have a mind to do a foolish thing, do not fancy you are fated to do it.  This is tempting Providence, and not trusting him.  It is, indeed, “charging God with folly.”  Prudence is his gift, and you obey him better when you make use of prudence under the direction of prayer, than when you madly run into ruin, and think you are only submitting to your fate.  Never fancy that you are compelled to undo yourself, or to rush upon your own destruction, in compliance with any supposed fatality.  Never believe that God conceals his will from a sober Christian who obeys his laws, and reveals it to a vagabond gypsy, who runs up and down, breaking the laws both of God and man.  King Saul never consulted the witch till he had left off serving God.  The Bible will direct us what to do, better than any conjurer; and no days are unlucky but those which we make so by our own vanity, folly, and sin.

THE HAPPY WATERMAN

A gentleman and lady walking on the bank of the river Thames, spied a small ferry-boat, with a neatly-dressed waterman, rowing towards them; on his nearer approach, they read on the stern of his boat these words, THE HAPPY WATERMAN.  Without taking any notice of it, they determined to enter into conversation with him; and inquiring into his situation in life, they found that he had a wife and five children, and supported also an old father and mother-in-law by his own labor.  The gentleman and lady were upon this still more surprised at the title he had given himself, and said,

“My friend, if this is your situation, how is it that you call yourself ’the happy waterman’?”