I then,
having made friends with the jailor's wife, visited him in his
cell, where I found him very much cast down. He said, that my
mother had appeared to him in a dream, and talked to him about a
resurrection and Christ Jesus; there was a Bible before him, and he
told me the chaplain had just been praying with him. He reproached
himself much, saying, he was afraid he had been my ruin, by
teaching me bad habits. I told him not to say any such thing, for
that I had been the cause of his, owing to the misfortune of my
eye. He begged me to give over all unlawful pursuits, saying, that
if persisted in, they were sure of bringing a person to
destruction. I advised him to try and make his escape, proposing,
that when the turnkey came to let me out, he should knock him down,
and fight his way out, offering to assist him; showing him a small
saw, with which one of our companions, who was in the
neighbourhood, had provided me, and with which he could have cut
through his fetters in five minutes; but he told me he had no wish
to escape, and was quite willing to die. I was rather hard at that
time; I am not very soft now; and I felt rather ashamed of my
father's want of what I called spirit. He was not executed after
all; for the chaplain, who was connected with a great family, stood
his friend, and got his sentence commuted, as they call it, to
transportation; and in order to make the matter easy, he induced my
father to make some valuable disclosures with respect to the
smashers' system.
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