search for her; and now to lose her again, when I was so sure I had found her, will break my heart more effectually.'
'Well, but if she be thy mother', says the Quaker, 'how can it be that she should not know thee?' 'Alas!', says she, 'I have been lost to her ever since I was a child; she has never seen me.'
'And hast thou never seen her?' says the Quaker. 'Yes', says she; 'I have seen her; often enough I saw her; for when she was the Lady Roxana I was her housemaid, being a servant, but I did not know her then, nor she me; but it has all come out since. Has she not a maid named Amy?' Note—The honest Quaker was nonplussed, and greatly surprised at that question.
'Truly', says she, 'the Lady has several women servants, but I do not know all their names.' 'But her woman, her favourite 'adds the girl; 'is not her name Amy?'
'Why, truly', says the Quaker, with a very happy turn of wit, 'I do not like to be examined; but lest thou shouldest take up any mistakes by reason of my backwardness to speak, I will answer thee for once, that what her woman's name is I know not, but they call her Cherry.'
N.B.—My husband gave her that name in jest on our wedding-day, and we had called her by it ever after; so that she spoke literally true at that time.
The girl replied very modestly that she was sorry if she gave her any offence in asking; that she did not design to be rude to her, or pretend to examine her; but that she was in such an agony at this disaster that she knew not what she did or said; and that she should be very sorry to disoblige her, but begged of her again, as she was a Christian and a woman, and had been a mother of children, that she would take pity on her, and, if possible, assist her, so that she might but come to me and speak a few words to me.
The tender-hearted Quaker told me the girl spoke this with such moving eloquence that it forced tears from her; but she was obliged to say that she neither knew where I was gone or how to write to me; but that, if she did ever see me again, she would not fail to give me an account of all she had said to her, or that she should yet think fit to say, and to take my answer to it, if I thought fit to give any.
Then the Quaker took the freedom to ask a few particulars about this wonderful story, as she called it; at which the girl, beginning at the first distresses of my life, and indeed of her own, went through all the history of her miserable education, her service under the Lady Roxana, as she called me, and her relief by Mrs Amy, with the reasons she had to believe that, as Amy owned herself to be the same that lived with her mother, and especially that Amy was the Lady Roxana's maid too, and came out of France with her, she was by those circumstances, and several others in her conversation, as fully convinced that the Lady Roxana was her mother, as she was that the Lady at her house (the Quaker's) was the very same Roxana that she had been servant to.
My good friend the Quaker, though terribly shocked at the story, and not well knowing what to say, yet was too much try friend to seem convinced in a thing which she did not know to be true, and which, if it was true, she could see plainly I had a mind should not be known; so she turned her discourse to argue the girl out of it. She insisted upon the slender evidence she had of the fact itself, and the rudeness of claiming
