e
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