My education, till past fourteen, was no better than
very vulgar; reading, or rather spelling, an illegible
scrawl, and a little ordinary plain work composed the whole
system of it; and then all my foundation in virtue was no
other than a total ignorance of vice, and the shy timidity
general to our sex, in the tender stage of life when objects
alarm or frighten more by their novelty than anything else.
But then, this is a fear too often cured at the expence of
innocence, when Miss, by degrees, begins no longer to look
on a man as a creature of prey that will eat her.
My poor mother had divided her time so entirely be-
tween her scholars and her little domestic cares, that she
had spared very little of it to my instruction, having,
from her own innocence from all ill, no hint or thought of
guarding me against any.
I was now entering on my fifteenth year, when the
worst of ills befell me in the loss of my tender fond par-
ents, who were both carried off by the small-pox, within a
few days of each other; my father dying first, and thereby
hastening the death of my mother; so that I was now left an
unhappy friendless orphan (for my father's coming to settle
there was accidental, he being originally a Kentishman).
That cruel distemper which had proved so fatal to them, had
indeed seized me, but with such mild and favourable symptoms,
that I was presently out of danger, and, what I then did not
know the value of, was entirely unmark'd.
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