m was set, and then got a
surgeon in a considerable city, remote from that place where it was
done, pretending they were gentlemen travelling towards Carlisle and
that they had been attacked on the road by highwaymen, and that one of
them had shot him into the arm and broke the bone.

This, he said, his friend managed so well, that they were not suspected
at all, but lay still till he was perfectly cured. He gave me so many
distinct accounts of his adventures, that it is with great reluctance
that I decline the relating them; but I consider that this is my own
story, not his.

I then inquired into the circumstances of his present case at that
time, and what it was he expected when he came to be tried. He told me
that they had no evidence against him, or but very little; for that of
three robberies, which they were all charged with, it was his good
fortune that he was but in one of them, and that there was but one
witness to be had for that fact, which was not sufficient, but that it
was expected some others would come in against him; that he thought
indeed, when he first saw me, that I had been one that came of that
errand; but that if somebody came in against him, he hoped he should be
cleared; that he had had some intimation, that if he would submit to
transport himself, he might be admitted to it without a trial, but that
he could not think of it with any temper, and thought he could much
easier submit to be hanged.

I blamed him for that, and told him I blamed him on two accounts;
first, because if he was transported, there might be a hundred ways for
him that was a gentleman, and a bold enterprising man, to find his way
back again, and perhaps some ways and means to come back before he
went. He smiled at that part, and said he should like the last the
best of the two, for he had a kind of horror upon his mind at his being
sent over to the plantations, as Romans sent condemned slaves to work
in the mines; that he thought the passage into another state, let it be
what it would, much more tolerable at the gallows, and that this was
the general notion of all the gentlemen who were driven by the exigence
of their fortunes to take the road; that at the place of execution
there was at least an end of all the miseries of the present state, and
as for what was to follow, a man was, in his opinion, as likely to
repent sincerely in the last fortnight of his life, under the pressures
and agonies of a jail and the condemn