Like Peace, he had interests outside his ordinary
profession. He had at one time propounded a scheme for the abolition of
the National Debt, a man clearly determined to benefit his fellowmen in
some way or other. A predilection for gin would seem to have been his
only concession to the ordinary weakness of humanity. And now he had
arrived in Armley Jail to exercise his happy dispatch on the greatest
of the many criminals who passed through his hands, one who, in his own
words, "met death with greater firmness" than any man on whom he had
officiated during seven years of Crown employment.

The day of February the 25th broke bitterly cold. Like Charles I.
before him, Peace feared lest the extreme cold should make him appear
to tremble on the scaffold. He had slept calmly till six o'clock in the
morning. A great part of the two hours before the coming of the hangman
Peace spent in letter-writing. He wrote two letters to his wife, in one
of which he copied out some verses he had written in Woking Prison
on the death of their little boy John. In the second he expressed his
satisfaction that he was to die now and not linger twenty years in
prison. To his daughter, step-son and son-in-law he wrote letters of
fervent, religious exhortation and sent them tracts and pictures
which he had secured from well-intentioned persons anxious about
his salvation. To an old friend, George Goodlad, a pianist, who
had apparently lived up to his name, he wrote: "You chose an honest
industrious way through life, but I chose the one of dishonesty,
villainy and sin"; let his fate, he said, be a warning.

Peace ate a hearty breakfast and awaited the coming of the executioner
with calm. He had been troubled with an inconvenient cough the night
before. "I wonder," he said to one of his warders, "if Marwood could
cure this cough of mine." He had got an idea into his head that Marwood
would "punish" him when he came to deal with him on the scaffold, and
asked to see the hangman a few minutes before the appointed hour. "I
hope you will not punish me. I hope you will do your work quickly," he
said to Marwood. "You shall not suffer pain from my hand," replied that
worthy. "God bless you," exclaimed Peace, "I hope to meet you all in
heaven. I am thankful to say my sins are all forgiven." And so these two
pious men--on the morning of an execution Marwood always knelt down and
asked God's blessing on the work he had to do--shook hands together and
set abo