For this Waller going on in the same fact after the death of Dalton, became an evidence against many others, sometimes in one country by one name, by and by in another country by another name.  In Cambridgeshire, particularly, he convicted two men for a robbery whose lives were saved by means of the Clerk of the Peace entertaining some suspicion of this Mr. Waller’s veracity.  But as practices of this sort, though they may continue undiscovered for some time, rarely escape for good and all, so Waller’s fate came home to him at last; for a worthy magistrate suspecting the truth of an information which he gave before him by another name, and he coming afterwards and owning his true name to be Waller, he was apprehended for the perjury contained in the said examination, and committed to Newgate, and at the next sessions at the Old Bailey received sentence for this offence to stand in the pillory near the Seven Dials.  He had scarce been exalted above five minutes, before the mob knocked him on the head, for which fact Andrew Dalton, who did it to revenge the death of his brother, the criminal of whom we are now speaking, together with one Richard Griffith, at the time I am now writing, are under sentence of death.

But to return to James Dalton, he continued to behave uniformly and penitently all the time he lay under conviction, and as the friends and relations of Nichols applied themselves to him about clearing the innocence of their deceased friend, he said that Neeves himself actually committed the fact, which he swore upon the person they mentioned, and that he was entirely innocent of whatever was laid to his charge.

When the bellman came to repeat the verses, which he always does the night before the malefactors are to die, Dalton illuminated his cell with six candles.  In his passage to the place of execution he appeared very cheerful.  When he arrived there, having once more denied in the most solemn manner the fact for which he was to suffer, he yielded up his breath at Tyburn, the 13th of May, 1730, being then somewhat above thirty years of age.

[Illustration:  HIGHWAY ROBBERY OF HIS MAJESTY’S MAIL

Two waylaid postboys are being bound back to back, while one of the highwaymen carries off the mail-bag

(From the Annals of Newgate)]

FOOTNOTES: 

   [95] On Feb. 22, 1727, when the Spaniards attacked with 20,000
        men and were repulsed with a loss of 5,000.  The English lost 300.

   [96] See page 463.

The Life of HUGH HOUGHTON, alias AWTON, alias NORTON, who robbed the Bristol Mail