extraordinary man; ’tis all that I am able to do, to say that he
revived my heart, and brought me into such a condition that
I never knew anything of in my life before. I was covered
with shame and tears for things past, and yet had at the same
time a secret surprising joy at the prospect of being a true
penitent, and obtaining the comfort of a penitent–I mean, the
hope of being forgiven; and so swift did thoughts circulate,
and so high did the impressions they had made upon me run,
that I thought I could freely have gone out that minute to
execution, without any uneasiness at all, casting my soul
entirely into the arms of infinite mercy as a penitent.
The good gentleman was so moved also in my behalf with a
view of the influence which he saw these things had on me,
that he blessed God he had come to visit me, and resolved not
to leave me till the last moment; that is, not to leave visiting me.
It was no less than twelve days after our receiving sentence
before any were ordered for execution, and then upon a
Wednesday the dead warrant, as they call it, came down, and
I found my name was among them. A terrible blow this was
to my new resolutions; indeed my heart sank within me, and
I swooned away twice, one after another, but spoke not a word.
The good minister was sorely afflicted for me, and did what he
could to comfort me with the same arguments, and the same
moving eloquence that he did before, and left me not that
evening so long as the prisonkeepers would suffer him to stay
in the prison, unless he would be locked up with me all night,
which he was not willing to be.
I wondered much that I did not see him all the next day, it
being the day before the time appointed for execution; and I
was greatly discouraged, and dejected in my mind, and indeed
almost sank for want of the comfort which he had so often,
and with such success, yielded me on his former visits. I
waited with great impatience, and under the greatest oppressions
of spirits imaginable, till about four o’clock he came to my
apartment; for I had obtained the favour, by the help of money,
nothing being to be done in that place without it, not to be
kept in the condemned hole, as they call it, among the rest of
the prisoners who were to die, but to have a little dirty
chamber to myself.
My heart leaped within me for joy when I heard his voice at
the door, even before I saw him; but let any one judge what
kind of motion I found in my soul, when after having made a
short excuse for his not coming, he showed me that his time
had been employed on my account; that he had obtained a
favourable report from the Recorder to the Secretary of State
in my particular case, and, in short, that he had brought me
a reprieve.
He used all the caution that he was able in letting me know
a thing which it would have been a double cruelty to have
concealed; and yet it was too much for me; for as grief had
overset me before, so did joy overset me now, and I fell into
a much more dangerous swooning than I did at first, and it
was not without a great difficulty that I was recovered at all.
The good man having made a very Christian exhortation to
me, not to let the joy of my reprieve put the remembrance of
my past sorrow out of my mind, and having told me that he
must leave me, to go and enter the reprieve in the books, and
show it to the sheriffs, stood up just before his going away,
and in a very earnest manner prayed to God for me, that my
repentance might be made unfeigned and sincere; and that
my coming back, as it were, into life again, might not be a
returning to the follies of life which I had made such solemn