Chapter 1.XVIII.

As the point was that night agreed, or rather determined, that my mother
should lye-in of me in the country, she took her measures accordingly; for
which purpose, when she was three days, or thereabouts, gone with child,
she began to cast her eyes upon the midwife, whom you have so often heard
me mention; and before the week was well got round, as the famous Dr.
Manningham was not to be had, she had come to a final determination in her
mind,--notwithstanding there was a scientific operator within so near a
call as eight miles of us, and who, moreover, had expressly wrote a five
shillings book upon the subject of midwifery, in which he had exposed, not
only the blunders of the sisterhood itself,--but had likewise super-added
many curious improvements for the quicker extraction of the foetus in cross
births, and some other cases of danger, which belay us in getting into the
world; notwithstanding all this, my mother, I say, was absolutely
determined to trust her life, and mine with it, into no soul's hand but
this old woman's only.--Now this I like;--when we cannot get at the very
thing we wish--never to take up with the next best in degree to it:--no;
that's pitiful beyond description;--it is no more than a week from this
very day, in which I am now writing this book for the edification of the
world;--which is March 9, 1759,--that my dear, dear Jenny, observing I
looked a little grave, as she stood cheapening a silk of five-and-twenty
shillings a yard,--told the mercer, she was sorry she had given him so much
trouble;--and immediately went and bought herself a yard-wide stuff of ten-
pence a yard.--'Tis the duplication of one and the same greatness of soul;
only what lessened the honour of it, somewhat, in my mother's case, was,
that she could not heroine it into so violent and hazardous an extreme, as
one in her situation might have wished, because the old midwife had really
some little claim to be depended upon,--as much, at least, as success could
give her; having, in the course of her practice of near twenty years in the