she ordered her to turn up a bed, which being unable to do for want of strength, she ordered her son to beat her till she did, and that he accordingly did beat her with a belt, with a buckle at the end of it, till the blood gushed from various parts of her body, and fell in streams upon the floor, but said that she was pretty well recovered from these wounds before she had any further beating.

It having been represented that she had been accustomed to accommodate unhappy woman in their lying-in, and to provide for their children for certain sums, and that she had destroyed several of those children, as well as many others, in their birth, for rewards, and being desired by authority to make an inquiry into those facts, I laid before her the heinousness of those crimes, and the injury it would do her immortal soul if she was guilty of any such, and should die without a due repentance of them, and that the first step to repentance was a confession of her guilt; and observed, as she had found so much ease in unburthening her mind, respecting her treatment of the poor girls, she would find that satisfaction considerably augmented by laying open every guilty action which oppressed her mind. But she assured me, in a manner that forced belief, that all such stories were intirely groundless, and mere inventions to blacken her character, already sufficiently darkened by the load of iniquity she was really guilty of, and for which she acknowledged she was most deservedly to suffer: She admitted that she often had unfortunate women to lie-in at her house, but that she never undertook to provide for their children, they being always taken away and provided for by their friends, and she heard no more of them; and that she never had a child dead in her house but one, which was still born; and that, during her whole practice, only two woman had died under her care, and that not through any neglect, or want in judgment or tenderness in her; and this she assured me would be confirmed not only by the officers of the parish of St. Dunstan but also by her neighbours, and many others now living; and indeed I have no sort of reason to doubt the truth of it, and therefore cannot help lamenting the depravity of the age in inventing and propagating such horrid untruths, which have with too much success been impressed into the minds of the people, in prejudice of this unhappy family. But, thank God, justice in the midst of public prejudice has been preserved,