business of love, is like farthings in the business of trade, which (tho’ they are not the legal coin of the nation) ought to be allow’d and tolerated, if it were only for the conveniency of ready change. Well, says my lord, since ’tis so, and your calling expos’d you to so much suffering, I hope you made your gallants pay for it? That you may be sure I did, answers our damsel, I sold my maidenhead to fifteen several customers, by the same token seven of them were _Jews_, and it pleases me to think how I cheated those loggerheads in their own _Mosaical_ indications. I never parted with any of my favours, nay, not so much as a clap _gratis_, except a lieutenant and ensign whom once I admitted upon trust, by the same token they built a sconce, and left me in the lurch. I always took care to secure my money first; tho’ those ungracious vipers of the army would rifle me now and then in spite of all my precaution: for my lord, we whores are like the sea, what we gain in one place we lose in another. Take her away, says my lord _Minos_, take her away, see her fairly dipt every morning for this twelvemonth over head and ears in good wholesome brimstone: to be both merchant and merchandize, to sell her self for money and yet expect pleasure for it, is worse exaction than was ever practised in _Lombard-street_ or _Cornhil_. Our _Drury-lane_ nymph was no sooner carried off, but the soldier advanced forward, and thus told his tale: My lord, you are not to expect a fine speech from me, I am a soldier, and we soldiers are men of action, and not of words. I was a barber’s prentice in the _strand_, liv’d with him five years, got his maid with child, beat his wife for pretending to reprove me, had run on score at all the painted lattices in the neighbour-hood, and my circumstances being such, was easily persuaded to turn gentleman-soldier. My captain promis’d to make me a serjeant the very moment after I was listed, but he serv’d me just as he did his creditors, whom, to my certain knowledge, he left in the lurch. Well, my lord, I follow’d him to _Flanders_, where I stood buff to death and damnation four campaigns, sometimes for a groat, sometimes for nothing a-day. Had I more sins to answer for than either the colonel or agent of our regiment, I have bustled thro’ misery enough to wipe out all my scores, curtail’d of my pay to keep a double-chinn’d chaplain, who never preach’d among us, and maintain an hospital, where I could never expect to be admitted without bribery; forc’d for want of subsistence to steal offal, which an hungry dog would piss upon, and if discover’d sure to be rewarded with the wooden-horse, and lest the unweildy beast shou’d throw me, secur’d by a brace of musquets dangling on my heels; to lie up to the chin in water for preventing of rheumatisms, and smoak wholesome dock-leaves to prevent being dunn’d by my stomach; drubb’d and can’d without any provocation, by a smooth-fac’d