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 be removed with all our effects into Maryland, after a long and unpleasant voyage. There we bought two servants, an English woman and a Negro man; then a piece of ground of fifty acres, and built a decent house thereon. And indeed our affairs went on very prosperously, so that we looked upon one another with pleasure; and then I obtained my husband’s consent to go to Virginia and to discover myself to my brother. When I landed, I wrote a letter to him, telling him of several particular affairs j which letter came into his son’s hands, who asking the messenger where the gentlewoman was that wrote it, he came to me which was about seven miles off, attended by two servants on horseback, and coming to me, kissed me, saying, “Dear mother are you alive!” and then he fell to weeping.

He told me that his father was quite superanuated and beside himself, which bade him conceal the letter from him; at the plantation which my mother had left me, was in his possession; so the produce of it he gave a hundred pounds, engaging to be my trustee and faithful steward. Indeed, in all his