My Granmother was a Lady of Quality and lived in her own House in Hannover Squair and was used after her Deth very cruelly by one Mistress Tallmash and Kadwallader which was the Stoard and was sent in a Waggin like a Beggar Deere Sur Mr. Gnawbit he used me shameful wich I was Blak and Blue and the Old Gentleman he ses you Run away ses he into Charwood chaise and join the Blaks Deere Sur this is All which Captain Nite would sware but as eloped I am now lying here many weekes Deere Sur I shood like to be hanged in Wite for I am Innocent leastways of meaning to kill the Grannydeere."
This was a Curious kind of Schoolboy letter. Different I take it from those one gets from a Brother, asking for a Crown, a Pony, or a Plumcake. But my Schools had been of the hardest, and this was my Holiday letter.
When the Mayor read it, he burst out a-laughing, and says that no such Thieves' Flash must be sent to the Foot of the Throne. But Mr. Shapcott told him that he would not have one word altered; that he would not even strike out the paragraph where I had been irreverent enough to quote a Text (and spell it badly); and that what I had written, and naught else, should go to the King. He took it to London himself, and his Majesty being much elated by some successes in Germany, and the Discovery of a Jacobite Plot, and moved moreover by the intercession of a Foreign Lady, that was his favourite, and who vowed that the little Deer-Stealer's Petition was Monstrous Droll, and almost as good as a Play,—His Majesty was graciously pleased to remit my Sentence, on condition of my transporting myself for life to His Majesty's Plantations in North America.
As to my transporting "myself," that was a Fiction. I was henceforth as much a Slave to my own Countrymen as I was in after days to the Moors. The Shapcotts would willingly have provided me with the means of going to the uttermost ends of the World, but that was not the way the thing was to be done. Flesh and Blood were bought and sold in those days, and it did not much matter about the colour. By that strange Laxity which then tempered the severity of the Laws, I was permitted, for many days after my Fate was settled, to remain in a kind of semi-Enlargement. I suppose that Mr. Shapcott gave bail for me; but I was taken into his Family, and treated with the most Loving Kindness, till the fearful intelligence came that I, with two hundred other Convicts, had been "Taken up" for Transportation by Sir Basil Hopwood, a rich Merchant and Alderman of London, who paid a certain Sum a head for us to the King's Government for taking us to America, where he might make what profit he pleased, by selling our wretched Carcasses to be Slaves to the Planters.
Oh, the terrible Parting! but there was no other Way, and it had to be Endured. My kind friends made me up a packet of Necessaries for the Voyage, and with a Heavy Heart I bade them farewell. These good people are all Dead; but their woman-servant, Ruth, a pure soul, of great Serenity of Countenance, still lives; and every Christmas does the Carrier convey for me to Aylesbury a Hamper full of the Good Things of this Life, and Ten Golden Guineas. And I know that this Good and Faithful Servant (who has been well provided for) just touches the Kissing-crust of one of the Pies my Lilias has made for her, and that she goes straight with the rest, Money and Cates, to the Gaol, and therewith relieves the Debtors (whom Heaven deliver out of their Captivity!). And it is more seemly that she rather than I should do this thing, seeing that there are those who will not believe that after a Hard Life a man can keep a fleshy heart, and who would be apt to dub me Hypocrite if these Doles came from me directly.