which he wrought honestly for many years until he
fell very ill of dropsy, for the cure of which, being carried to St.
Thomas's Hospital, he after his recovery applied himself to selling
fish, instead of going again to sea. How he came to be engaged in the
crimes he afterwards perpetrated we cannot well learn, and therefore
shall not pretend to relate. However, he associated himself with a very
numerous gang, such as Mills, Pugh, Blunt, Bishop, Gutteridge, and
Matthews, who became the evidence against him. He positively averred
that one of the robberies for which he was convicted, was the first he
ever committed. He expressed the greatest horror and detestation for
murder imaginable, protesting he was no ways guilty of that committed on
Brixton Causeway.

[Illustration: STEPHEN GARDINER MAKING HIS DYING SPEECH AT TYBURN

This plate gives an excellent representation of an execution. The
condemned man is in his shroud; the hangman is adjusting the knot, and
at a signal the cart will drive away; nearby is the sheriff in his state
carriage; and gazing on is a curious, morbid crowd of spectators.

(_From the Newgate Calendar_)]

At the time of his trial at Kingston he behaved himself very insolently
and audaciously; but when sentence had been passed upon him, most of
that unruly temper was lost, and he began to think seriously of
preparing for another world. He confessed that his sins were many, and
that judgment against him was just, meekly accepting his death as the
due rewards of his deeds. He was the example of seriousness and
penitence to the other twelve malefactors who suffered with him, being
about thirty-seven years of age at the time of his decease.

John Pugh, otherwise Blueskin, was born at Morpeth near
Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His father was a carrier in tolerable business and
circumstance, who put him to be a servant in a silver-spinner's in
Moorfields, where he soon learnt all sorts of wickedness, beginning with
defrauding his master and doing any other little tricks of that kind, as
opportunity would give him leave. We are told of him what perhaps can be
hardly said of any other criminal who hath died in the same way for many
years past, that though he was but twenty-two years of age, he had spent
twelve of them in cheating, pilfering, and robbing. At last he fell into
the gang that brought him to his death, for a robbery committed by
several of them in the county of Surrey. Pugh, though so young a fellow,
w