had injured gave her so great
grief and anxiety of mind that she could scarce be persuaded to get down
a sufficient quantity of food to preserve her life until the time of her
execution. But the minister at Newgate having demonstrated to her the
wickedness and the folly of such a course, she by degrees came to have a
better sense of things; her mind grew calmer, and though her repentance
was accompanied with sighs and tears, yet she did not burst out into
those lamentable outcries by which she before disturbed both herself and
those poor creatures who were under sentence with her. In this
disposition of mind she continued until the day of her death, which was
on the 12th of September, 1726, being between twenty-seven-and-eight
years of age, in the company of the before-mentioned malefactors,
Cartwright, Blacket, Holmes, Fitzpatrick, Robinson, and William Allison,
a poor country lad of about twenty-five, apparently of an easy gentle
temper who had been induced into the fact, partly through covetousness,
and partly through want.

The Life of TIMOTHY BENSON, a Highwayman

Amongst the number of those unfortunate persons whose memory we have
preserved to the world in order that their punishments may become
lasting warnings unto all who are in any danger of following their
footsteps, none is more capable of affording useful reflections than the
incidents that are to be found in the life of this robber are likely to
create. He was the son of a serjeant's wife, in the regiment of the Earl
of Derby, but who his father was it would be hard to say. His mother
having had a long intrigue with one Captain Benson and the serjeant
dying soon after this child was born, she thought fit to give him the
captain's name, declaring publicly enough, that if it was in her power
to distinguish, the captain must be his father. Certain it is that the
woman acted cunningly, at least, for Benson, who had never had a child,
was so pleased with the boy's ingenuity that he sent him to a grammar
school in Yorkshire, where he caused him to be educated as well as if
he had been his legitimate son.

Nothing could be more dutiful than Tim was, while a child. The captain
was continually vexed with long letters from the gentlewoman where he
was boarded, concerning master's fine person, great parts and wonderful
improvements, which Benson, being a man of sense, took to be such gross
flattery that he came down to Bellerby, the village where the child