The English Spy, page 140 by Bernard Blackmantle
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ley brunette."--"Shall I tell your honour's fortune?" said the elder of the two, approaching me; while Eglantine, who had already dismounted and given his horse to one of the brown urchins of the party, had encircled the waist of the younger sibyl, and was tickling her into a trot in an opposite direction. "Ay do, Nan," ~161~~ said Echo, "cast his nativity, open the book of fate, and tell the boy his future destiny." It would be the height of absurdity to repeat half the nonsense this oracle of Bagley uttered relative to my future fortunes; but with the cunning peculiar to her cast, she discovered I was fresh, and what tormented me more, (although on her part it was no doubt accidental) alluded to an amour in which my heart was much interested with a little divinity in the neighbourhood of Eton. This hint was sufficient to give Tom his cue, and I was doomed to be pestered for the remainder of the day with questions and raillery on my progress in the court of Love. On our quitting the old gypsy woman, a pair of buxom damsels came in sight, advancing from the Abingdon road; they were no doubt like ourselves, I thought, come to consult the oracle of Bagley, or, perhaps, were the daughters of some respectable farmer who owned the adjoining land. All these doubts were, however, of short duration; for Tom Echo no sooner caught sight of their faces, than away he bounded towards them like a young colt in all the frolic of untamed playfulness, and before I could reach him, one of the ladies was rolling on the green carpet of luxuriant Nature. In the deep bosom of Bagley Wood, impervious to the eye of authority, many a sportive scene occurs which would alarm the ethics of the solemn sages of the cloistered college. They were, I discovered, sisters, too early abandoned by an unfeeling parent to poverty, and thus became an easy prey to the licentious and the giddy, who, in the pursuit of pleasure, never contemplate the attendant misery which is sure to follow the victim of seduction. There was something romantic in their sto