the people who associated with Mrs. Fry, charitable as they were, viewed her plans as Utopian and visionary, while she herself almost quailed at their very contemplation.  It also placed a great strain upon her nervous system to attend women condemned to death.  She wrote:  “I have suffered much about the hanging of criminals.”  And again:  “I have just returned from a melancholy visit to Newgate, where I have been at the request of Elizabeth Fricker, previous to her execution to-morrow at 8 o’clock.  I found her much hurried, distressed and tormented in mind.  Her hands were cold, and covered with something like the perspiration which precedes death, and in an universal tremor.  The women who were with her said she had been so outrageous before our going, that they thought a man must be sent for to manage her.  However, after a serious time with her, her troubled soul became calmed.”  Another entry in the same journal casts a lurid light upon the interior of Newgate.  “Besides this poor young woman, there are also six men to be hanged, one of whom has a wife near her confinement, also condemned, and seven young children.  Since the awful report came down he has become quite mad from horror of mind.  A straight waistcoat could not keep him within bounds; he had just bitten the turnkey; I saw the man come out with his hand bleeding as I passed the cell.  I hear that another who has been tolerably educated and brought up, was doing all he could to harden himself through unbelief, trying to convince himself that religious truths were idle tales.”  Contemporary light is cast upon this matter by a letter which the Hon. G.H.  Bennett addressed to the Corporation of London, relative to the condition of the prison.  In it this writer observed:—­

A man by the name of Kelly, who was executed some weeks back for robbing a house, counteracted, by his conversation and by the jests he made of all religious subjects, the labors of Dr. Cotton to produce repentance and remorse among the prisoners in the cells; and he died as he lived, hardened and unrepenting.  He sent to me the day before his execution, and when I saw him he maintained the innocence of the woman convicted with him (Fricker, before mentioned), asserting that not her, but a boy concealed, opened the door and let him into the house.  When I pressed him to tell me the names of the parties concerned, whereby to save the woman’s life, he declined complying without promise of a pardon.  I urged as strongly as I could the crime of suffering an innocent woman to be executed to screen criminal accomplices; but it was all to no effect, and he suffered, maintaining to the last the same story.  With him was executed a lad of nineteen or twenty years of age, whose fears and remorse Kelly was constantly ridiculing.

About this time, Mrs. Fry noted in her journal the encouragement she had received from those who were in authority, as well as the eager and thankful attitude