La encargada de criar a Moll Flanders tiene una escuela donde se educan los huérfanos. Moll
no soporta la idea de trabajar como sirvienta. Cree que puede mantenerse con lo
que le enseñan con la aguja y el hilo. La mujer se enternece al escucharla
rogar para quedarse. Al final los sinónimos de drudge, prithee, forsooth, gibing and yearn, y algo sobre el autor, Daniel Defoe.
This woman had
also had a little school, which she kept to teach children to read and to work;
and having, as I have said, lived before that in good fashion, she bred up the
children she took with a great deal of art, as well as with a great deal of
care.
But that which
was worth all the rest, she bred them up very religiously, being herself a very
sober, pious woman, very house-wifely and clean, and very mannerly, and with
good behaviour. So that in a word, expecting a plain diet, coarse lodging, and
mean clothes, we were brought up as mannerly and as genteelly as if we had been
at the dancing-school.
I was continued
here till I was eight years old, when I was terrified with news that the
magistrates (as I think they called them) had ordered that I should go to
service. I was able to do but very little service wherever I was to go, except
it was to run of errands and be a slave to some cookmaid, and this they
told me of often, which put me into a great fright; for I had a thorough
aversion to going to service, as they called it (that is, to be a servant),
though I was so young; and I told my nurse, as we called her, that I believed I
could get my living without going to service, if she pleased to let me; for she
had taught me to work with my needle, and spin worsted, which is the chief
trade of that city, and I told her that if she would keep me, I would work for
her, and I would work very hard.
I talked to her
almost every day of working hard; and, in short, I did nothing but work and cry
all day, which grieved the good, kind woman so much, that at last she began to
be concerned for me, for she loved me very well.
One day after
this, as she came into the room where all we poor children were at work, she
sat down just over against me, not in her usual place as mistress, but as if
she set herself on purpose to observe me and see me work. I was doing something
she had set me to; as I remember, it was marking some shirts which she had
taken to make, and after a while she began to talk to me. 'Thou foolish child,'
says she, 'thou art always crying (for I was crying then); ' please, what dost cry for?' 'Because they will take me
away,' says I, 'and put me to service, and I can't work housework.' 'Well,
child,' says she, 'but though you can't work housework, as you call it, you
will learn it in time, and they won't put you to hard things at first.' 'Yes,
they will,' says I, 'and if I can't do it they will beat me, and the maids will
beat me to make me do great work, and I am but a little girl and I can't do
it'; and then I cried again, till I could not speak any more to her.
Daniel Defoe |
This moved my
good motherly nurse, so that she from that time resolved I should not go to
service yet; so she bid me not cry, and she would speak to Mr. Mayor, and I
should not go to service till I was bigger.
Well, this did
not satisfy me, for to think of going to service was such a frightful thing to
me, that if she had assured me I should not have gone till I was twenty years
old, it would have been the same to me; I should have cried, I believe, all the
time, with the very apprehension of its being to be so at last.
When she saw
that I was not pacified yet, she began to be angry with me. 'And what would you
have?' says she; 'don't I tell you that you shall not go to service till your
are bigger?' 'Ay,' said I, 'but then I must go at last.' 'Why, what?' said she;
'is the girl mad? What would you be—a gentlewoman?' 'Yes,' says I, and cried
heartily till I roared out again.
This set the old
gentlewoman a-laughing at me, as you may be sure it would. 'Well, madam, indeed,'
says she, supporting me, 'you would be a gentlewoman; and pray how will
you come to be a gentlewoman? What! will you do it by your fingers' end?'
'Yes,' says I
again, very innocently.
'Why, what can
you earn?' says she; 'what can you get at your work?'
'Threepence,'
said I, 'when I spin, and fourpence when I work plain work.'
'Alas! poor
gentlewoman,' said she again, laughing, 'what will that do for thee?'
'It will keep
me,' says I, 'if you will let me live with you.' And this I said in such a poor
petitioning tone, that it made the poor woman's heart pity me, as she
told me afterwards.
'But,' says she,
'that will not keep you and buy you clothes too; and who must buy the little
gentlewoman clothes?' says she, and smiled all the while at me.
'I will work
harder, then,' says I, 'and you shall have it all.'
'Poor child! it
won't keep you,' says she; 'it will hardly keep you in victuals.'
'Then I will
have no victuals,' says I, again very innocently; 'let me but live with you.'
'Why, can you
live without victuals?' says she.
'Yes,' again
says I, very much like a child, you may be sure, and still I cried heartily… (Paragraphs
from Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe.)
Palabras reemplazadas
Drudge prithee
forsooth gibing yearn
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Para saber
Daniel Defoe (/ˌdænjəl dᵻˈfoʊ/; 1660 –1731) fue un
escritor y periodista inglés, famoso por su novela Robinson Crusoe. Defoe es
uno de los fundadores de la novela inglesa. Fue un escritor prolífico,
produciendo más de quinientos libros, panfletos y diarios de diversos temas,
incluyendo política, crimen, religión, matrimonio, psicología y lo supernatural.
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