have died, when the woman argued again for me, and entreated
her husband, seeing they had lost nothing, to let me go. I
offered him to pay for the two pieces, whatever the value was,
though I had not got them, and argued that as he had his goods,
and had really lost nothing, it would be cruel to pursue me to
death, and have my blood for the bare attempt of taking them.
I put the constable in mind that I had broke no doors, nor
carried anything away; and when I came to the justice, and
pleaded there that I had neither broken anything to get in, nor
carried anything out, the justice was inclined to have released
me; but the first saucy jade that stopped me, affirming that I
was going out with the goods, but that she stopped me and
pulled me back as I was upon the threshold, the justice upon
that point committed me, and I was carried to Newgate. That
horrid place! my very blood chills at the mention of its name;
the place where so many of my comrades had been locked up,
and from whence they went to the fatal tree; the place where
my mother suffered so deeply, where I was brought into the
world, and from whence I expected no redemption but by an
infamous death: to conclude, the place that had so long
expected me, and which with so much art and success I had
so long avoided.
I was not fixed indeed; ’tis impossible to describe the terror
of my mind, when I was first brought in, and when I looked
around upon all the horrors of that dismal place. I looked on
myself as lost, and that I had nothing to think of but of going
out of the world, and that with the utmost infamy: the hellish
noise, the roaring, swearing, and clamour, the stench and
nastiness, and all the dreadful crowd of afflicting things that
I saw there, joined together to make the place seem an emblem
of hell itself, and a kind of an entrance into it.
Now I reproached myself with the many hints I had had, as I
have mentioned above, from my own reason, from the sense
of my good circumstances, and of the many dangers I had
escaped, to leave off while I was well, and how I had withstood
them all, and hardened my thoughts against all fear. It seemed
to me that I was hurried on by an inevitable and unseen fate
to this day of misery, and that now I was to expiate all my
offences at the gallows; that I was now to give satisfaction to
justice with my blood, and that I was come to the last hour of
my life and of my wickedness together. These things poured
themselves in upon my thoughts in a confused manner, and
left me overwhelmed with melancholy and despair.
Them I repented heartily of all my life past, but that repentance
yielded me no satisfaction, no peace, no, not in the least,
because, as I said to myself, it was repenting after the power
of further sinning was taken away. I seemed not to mourn that
I had committed such crimes, and for the fact as it was an
offence against God and my neighbour, but I mourned that I
was to be punished for it. I was a penitent, as I thought, not
that I had sinned, but that I was to suffer, and this took away
all the comfort, and even the hope of my repentance in my
own thoughts.
I got no sleep for several nights or days after I came into that
wretched place, and glad I would have been for some time to
have died there, though I did not consider dying as it ought to
be considered neither; indeed, nothing could be filled with
more horror to my imagination than the very place, nothing
was more odious to me than the company that was there. Oh!
if I had but been sent to any place in the world, and not to
Newgate, I should have thought myself happy.
In the next place, how did the hardened wretches that were