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 resolutions to
forsake, and to repent of them. I joined heartily in the petition, and
must needs say I had deeper impressions upon my mind all that night, of
the mercy of God in sparing my life, and a greater detestation of my
past sins, from a sense of the goodness which I had tasted in this
case, than I had in all my sorrow before.