the same who lived so well at Dunstable, and the same who I
afterwards saw at Brickhill, when I was married to my last
husband, as has been related.
I was struck dumb at the sight, and knew neither what to say
nor what to do; he did not know me, and that was all the
present relief I had. I quitted my company, and retired as
much as that dreadful place suffers anybody to retire, and I
cried vehemently for a great while. ‘Dreadful creature that I
am,’ said I, ‘how may poor people have I made miserable?
How many desperate wretches have I sent to the devil?’ He
had told me at Chester he was ruined by that match, and that
his fortunes were made desperate on my account; for that
thinking I had been a fortune, he was run into debt more than
he was able to pay, and that he knew not what course to take;
that he would go into the army and carry a musket, or buy a
horse and take a tour, as he called it; and though I never told
him that I was a fortune, and so did not actually deceive him
myself, yet I did encourage the having it thought that I was so,
and by that means I was the occasion originally of his mischief.
The surprise of the thing only struck deeper into my thoughts,
any gave me stronger reflections than all that had befallen me
before. I grieved day and night for him, and the more for that
they told me he was the captain of the gang, and that he had
committed so many robberies, that Hind, or Whitney, or the
Golden Farmer were fools to him; that he would surely be
hanged if there were no more men left in the country he was
born in; and that there would abundance of people come in
against him.
I was overwhelmed with grief for him; my own case gave me
no disturbance compared to this, and I loaded myself with
reproaches on his account. I bewailed his misfortunes, and
the ruin he was now come to, at such a rate, that I relished
nothing now as I did before, and the first reflections I made
upon the horrid, detestable life I had lived began to return upon
me, and as these things returned, my abhorrence of the place
I was in, and of the way of living in it, returned also; in a word,
I was perfectly changed, and become another body.
While I was under these influences of sorrow for him, came
notice to me that the next sessions approaching there would
be a bill preferred to the grand jury against me, and that I
should be certainly tried for my life at the Old Bailey. My
temper was touched before, the hardened, wretched boldness
of spirit which I had acquired abated, and conscious in the
prison, guilt began to flow in upon my mind. In short, I began
to think, and to think is one real advance from hell to heaven.
All that hellish, hardened state and temper of soul, which I
have said so much of before, is but a deprivation of thought;
he that is restored to his power of thinking, is restored to himself.
As soon as I began, I say, to think, the first think that occurred
to me broke out thus: ‘Lord! what will become of me? I shall
certainly die! I shall be cast, to be sure, and there is nothing
beyond that but death! I have no friends; what shall I do? I
shall be certainly cast! Lord, have mercy upon me! What
will become of me?’ This was a sad thought, you will say, to
be the first, after so long a time, that had started into my soul
of that kind, and yet even this was nothing but fright at what
was to come; there was not a word of sincere repentance in it
all. However, I was indeed dreadfully dejected, and disconsolate
to the last degree; and as I had no friend in the world to
communicate my distressed thoughts to, it lay so heavy upon