My wife being now dead, I knew not what course to take in the world, and I grew so disconsolate and discouraged that I was next door to being distempered, and sometimes, indeed, I thought myself a little touched in my head. But it proved nothing but vapours and the vexation of this affair, and in about a year's time, or thereabouts, it wore off again.
I had rambled up and down in a most discontented, unsettled posture after this, I say, about a year, and then I considered I had three innocent children, and I could take no care of them, and that I must either go away and leave them to the wide world or settle here and get somebody to look after them, and that better a mother-in-law than no mother; for to live such a wandering life it would not do; so I resolved I would marry as anything offered, though it was mean, and the meaner the better. I concluded my next wife should be only taken as an upper servant; that is to say, a nurse to my children and housekeeper to myself; "and let her be whore or honest woman," said I, "as she likes best; I am resolved I will not much concern myself about that;" for I was now one desperate, that valued not how things went.
In this careless, and indeed rash, foolish humour, I talked to myself thus: "If I marry an honest woman, my children will be taken care of; if she be a slut and abuses me, as I see everybody does, I will kidnap her and send her to Virginia, to my plantations there, and there she shall work hard enough and fare hard enough to keep her chaste, I'll warrant her."
I knew well enough at first that these were mad, hare-brained notions, and I thought no more of being serious in them than I thought of being a man in the moon; but I know not how it happened to me, I reasoned and talked to myself in this wild manner so long that I brought myself to be seriously desperate; that is, to resolve upon another marriage, with all the suppositions of unhappiness that could be imagined to fall out.
And yet even this rash resolution of my senses did not come presently to action; for I was half a year after this before I fixed upon anything. At last, as he that seeks mischief shall certainly find it, so it was with me. There happened to be a young, or rather a middle-aged, woman in the next town, which was but a half-mile off, who usually was at my house and among my children every day when the weather was tolerable; and though she came but merely as a neighbour, and to see us, yet she was always helpful in directing and ordering things for them, and mighty handy about them, as well before my wife died as after.