The rest of the gentlemen seeing us striving cried, 'Give it her all';
but I absolutely refused that. Then one of them said, 'D--n ye, jack,
halve it with her; don't you know you should be always upon even terms
with the ladies.' So, in short, he divided it with me, and I brought
away thirty guineas, besides about forty-three which I had stole
privately, which I was sorry for afterward, because he was so generous.
Thus I brought home seventy-three guineas, and let my old governess see
what good luck I had at play. However, it was her advice that I should
not venture again, and I took her counsel, for I never went there any
more; for I knew as well as she, if the itch of play came in, I might
soon lose that, and all the rest of what I had got.
Fortune had smiled upon me to that degree, and I had thriven so much,
and my governess too, for she always had a share with me, that really
the old gentlewoman began to talk of leaving off while we were well,
and being satisfied with what we had got; but, I know not what fate
guided me, I was as backward to it now as she was when I proposed it to
her before, and so in an ill hour we gave over the thoughts of it for
the present, and, in a word, I grew more hardened and audacious than
ever, and the success I had made my name as famous as any thief of my
sort ever had been at Newgate, and in the Old Bailey.
I had sometime taken the liberty to play the same game over again,
which is not according to practice, which however succeeded not amiss;
but generally I took up new figures, and contrived to appear in new
shapes every time I went abroad.
It was not a rumbling time of the year, and the gentlemen being most of
them gone out of town, Tunbridge, and Epsom, and such places were full
of people. But the city was thin, and I thought our trade felt it a
little, as well as other; so that at the latter end of the year I
joined myself with a gang who usually go every year to Stourbridge
Fair, and from thence to Bury Fair, in Suffolk. We promised ourselves
great things there, but when I came to see how things were, I was weary
of it presently; for except mere picking of pockets, there was little
worth meddling with; neither, if a booty had been made, was it so easy
carrying it off, nor was there such a variety of occasion for business
in our way, as in London; all that I made of the whole journey was a
gold watch at Bury Fair, and a small parcel of linen at Cambridge,
which gave me an occasion to take leave of the place. It was on old
bite, and I thought might do with a country shopkeeper, though in
London it would not.