will give me as little occasion for vigilance as you can." "Sir,"
said I, "it will be a great instruction to me in my behaviour if you
please to give me some account of your late employments, and what
hardships or satisfactions you have had in them, that I may govern
myself accordingly." He answered, "To give you an example of the
drudgery we go through, I will entertain you only with my three last
stations. I was on the first of April last put to mortify a great
beauty, with whom I was a week; from her I went to a common swearer,
and have been last with a gamester. When I first came to my lady, I
found my great work was to guard well her eyes and ears; but her
flatterers were so numerous, and the house, after the modern way, so
full of looking-glasses, that I seldom had her safe but in her
sleep. Whenever we went abroad, we were surrounded by an army of
enemies; when a well-made man appeared, he was sure to have a
side-glance of observation; if a disagreeable fellow, he had a full
face, out of more inclination to conquests; but at the close of the
evening, on the sixth of the last month, my ward was sitting on a
couch, reading Ovid's epistles; and as she came to this line of
Helen to Paris,

'She half consents who silently denies,'

entered Philander, who is the most skilful of all men in an address
to women. He is arrived at the perfection of that art which gains
them; which is, 'to talk like a very miserable man, but look like a
very happy one.' I saw Dictinna blush at his entrance, which gave
me the alarm; but he immediately said something so agreeable on her
being at study, and the novelty of finding a lady employed in so
grave a manner, that he on a sudden became very familiarly a man of
no consequence, and in an instant laid all her suspicions of his