for the misfortune. She sent for a minister, too, a
serious, pious, good man, and applied herself with such earnestness, by
his assistance, to the work of a sincere repentance, that I believe,
and so did the minister too, that she was a true penitent; and, which
is still more, she was not only so for the occasion, and at that
juncture, but she continued so, as I was informed, to the day of her
death.

It is rather to be thought of than expressed what was now my condition.
I had nothing before me but present death; and as I had no friends to
assist me, or to stir for me, I expected nothing but to find my name in
the dead warrant, which was to come down for the execution, the Friday
afterwards, of five more and myself.

In the meantime my poor distressed governess sent me a minister, who at
her request first, and at my own afterwards, came to visit me. He
exhorted me seriously to repent of all my sins, and to dally no longer
with my soul; not flattering myself with hopes of life, which, he said,
he was informed there was no room to expect, but unfeignedly to look up
to God with my whole soul, and to cry for pardon in the name of Jesus
Christ. He backed his discourses with proper quotations of Scripture,
encouraging the greatest sinner to repent, and turn from their evil
way, and when he had done, he kneeled down and prayed with me.

It was now that, for the first time, I felt any real signs of
repentance. I now began to look back upon my past life with
abhorrence, and having a kind of view into the other side of time, and
things of life, as I believe they do with everybody at such a time,
began to look with a different aspect, and quite another shape, than
they did before. The greatest and best things, the views of felicity,
the joy, the griefs of life, were quite other things; and I had nothing
in my thoughts but what was so infinitely superior to what I had known
in life, that it appeared to me to be the greatest stupidity in nature
to lay any weight upon anything, though the most valuable in this world.

The word eternity represented itself with all its incomprehensible
additions, and I had such extended notions of it, that I know not how
to express them. Among the rest, how vile, how gross, how absurd did
every pleasant thing look!--I mean, that we had counted pleasant
before--especially when I reflected that these sordid trifles were the
things for which we forfeited eternal felicity.

With these reflecti