city where everybody passes by water; but he had, it seems, ferried over the Maas from Willemstadt, and so came to the very door, and I, looking towards the door upon hearing the horses, saw a gentleman alight and come in at the gate. I knew nothing, and expected nothing, to be sure, of the person; but, as I say, was surprised, and indeed more than ordinarily surprised, when, coming nearer to me, I saw it was my merchant of Paris, my benefactor, and indeed my deliverer.
I confess it was an agreeable surprise to me, and I was exceeding glad to see him, who was so honourable and so kind to me, and who indeed had saved my life. As soon as he saw me, he ran to me, took me in his arms, and kissed me with a freedom that he never offered to take with me before. 'Dear Madam ', says he, 'I am glad to see you safe in this country; if you had stayed two days longer in Paris you had been undone.' I was so glad to see him, that I could not speak a good while, and I burst out into tears without speaking a word for a minute; but I recovered that disorder, and said, 'The more, sir, is my obligation to you that saved my life'; and added, 'I am glad to see you here, that I may consider how to balance an account in which I am so much your debtor.' 'You and I will adjust that matter easily', says he, 'now we are so near together, Pray where do you lodge?' says he.
'In a very honest, good house', said I, 'where that gentleman, your friend, recommended me', pointing to the merchant in whose house we then were.
'And where you may lodge too, sir', says the gentleman, 'if it suits with your business and your other conveniency.'
'With all my heart', says he. 'Then, madam', adds he, turning to me, 'I shall be near you, and have time to tell you a story which will be very long, and yet many ways very pleasant to you; how troublesome that devilish fellow, the Jew, has been to me on your account, and what a hellish snare he had laid for you, if he could have found you.'
'I shall have leisure too, sir', said I, 'to tell you all my adventures since that, which have not been a few, I assure you.'
In short, he took up his lodgings in the same house where I lodged, and the room he lay in opened, as he was wishing it would, just opposite to my lodging-room, so we could almost call out of bed to one another; and I was not at all shy of him on that score, for I believed him perfectly honest, and so indeed he was; and if he had not, that article was at present no part of my concern.
It was not till two or three days, and after his first hurries of business were over, that we began to enter into the history of our affairs on every side, but, when we began, it took up all our conversation for almost a fortnight. First, I gave him a particular account of everything that happened material upon my voyage, and how we were driven into Harwich by a very terrible storm; how I had left my woman behind me, so frighted with the danger she had been in, that she durst not venture to set her foot into a ship again any more, and that I had not come myself if the bills I had of him had not been payable in Holland; but that money, he might see, would make a woman go anywhere.
He seemed to laugh at all our womanish fears upon the occasion of the storm, telling me it was nothing but what was very ordinary in those seas, but that they had harbours on every coast so near that they were seldom in danger of being lost indeed. 'For', says he, 'if they cannot fetch one
