Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,040 pages of information about Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences.

Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,040 pages of information about Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences.

Such narrow escapes, one would have imagined, might have taught him how dangerous a thing it was to dally with the laws of the nation in any respect whatsoever; and yet, when he was on shore in New England, where the master took care to provide him with as easy a service as a man could have wished, as soon as the captain’s back was turned, he found means to give the planter the slip, and in nine months’ time revisited London a second time.  Whether he intended to have gone on in the old trade or no is impossible for us to determine, but this we are certain, that he had not been in England many weeks ere a person who made it his business to detect such as returned from transportation clapped him up in his old lodging at Newgate, brought him to his trial, and convicted him the third time.  As soon as he had received sentence, he relinquished all hopes of life, and as in all this time he had never made any enquiry after his wife at Yarmouth, so he would not now bring an odium upon her and her family by sending to them, and making his misfortune public in the place where they lived.

The man seemed to be of an easy, tractable disposition, readily yielding to whatever those who conversed with them desired to bring him to, whether it were good or evil.  He attended with great seeming piety and devotion to the books which Thomas Smith read to his fellow prisoners, and gained thereby a tolerable notion of the duty of repentance, and that faith which men ought to have in Jesus Christ.  Thus by degrees he brought himself to a perfect indifference as to life or death, and at the place of execution showed neither by change of colour, or any other symptom any extraordinary fear of his approaching dissolution; and having conformed very devoutly to the prayers said by the Ordinary, after a short private devotion, he submitted to his fate with the afore-mentioned malefactors Smith and Reynolds, being then about twenty-eight years old or thereabouts.

The Life of MARY STANDFORD, a Pickpocket and Thief

This unfortunate woman was born of very good parents, who sent her to school, and caused her to be bred up in every other respect so as to be capable of performing well in her station of the world, and doing her duty towards God, from a just notion of religion.  But it happening, unluckily, that she set her mind on nothing so much as the company of young men and running about with them to fairs and such other country diversions, her friends were put under the necessity of sending her to London, a thing which they saw could not be avoided.

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Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.