The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders

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.