about four o’clock
A terrible blow this was to my new resolutions ; indeed my heart sank within me , and I swooned away twice , one after another , but spoke not a word . The good minister was sorely afflicted for me , and did what he could to comfort me with the same arguments , and the same moving eloquence that he did before , and left me not that evening so long as the prisonkeepers would suffer him to stay in the prison , unless he would be locked up with me all night , which he was not willing to be . I wondered much that I did not see him all the next day , it being the day before the time appointed for execution ; and I was greatly discouraged , and dejected in my mind , and indeed almost sank for want of the comfort which he had so often , and with such success , yielded me on his former visits . I waited with great impatience , and under the greatest oppressions of spirits imaginable , till about four o'clock he came to my apartment ; for I had obtained the favour , by the help of money , nothing being to be done in that place without it , not to be kept in the condemned hole , as they call it , among the rest of the prisoners who were to die , but to have a little dirty chamber to myself . My heart leaped within me for joy when I heard his voice at the door , even before I saw him ; but let any one judge what kind of motion I found in my soul , when after having made a short excuse for his not coming , he showed me that his time had been employed on my account ; that he had obtained a favourable report from the Recorder to the Secretary of State in my particular case , and , in short , that he had brought me a reprieve . He used all the caution that he was able in letting me know a thing which it would have been a double cruelty to have concealed ; and yet it was too much for me ; for as grief had overset me before , so did joy overset me now , and I fell into a much more dangerous swooning than I did at first , and it was not without a great difficulty that I was recovered at all . The good man having made a very Christian exhortation to me , not to let the joy of my reprieve put the remembrance of my past sorrow out of my mind , and having told me that he must leave me , to go and enter the reprieve in the books , and show it to the sheriffs , stood up just before his going away , and in a very earnest manner prayed to God for me , that my repentance might be made unfeigned and sincere ; and that my coming back , as it were , into life again , might not be a returning to the follies of life which I had made such solemn resolutions to forsake , and to repent of them .