“Fetch an officer,” said the harsh voice, addressing one of the shopmen.

“No—­no—­no!” screamed the wretched woman, falling on her knees in wild supplication.  “For my child’s sake—­in mercy of the innocent babe as yet unborn—­pity and forgive me!”

The harsh order was iterated; and Esther Mason, fainting with shame and agony, was conveyed to the prison in Giltspur Street.  The next day she was fully committed to Newgate on the capital charge of privately stealing in a shop to the value of five pounds.  A few hours after her incarceration within those terrible walls, she was prematurely delivered of a female child.

I have no moral doubt whatever, I never have had, that at the time of the committal of the felonious act, the intellect of Esther Mason was disordered.  Any other supposition is inconsistent with the whole tenor of her previous life and character “Lead us not into temptation” is indeed the holiest, because the humblest prayer.

Three weeks had elapsed before the first intimation of these events reached me, in a note from the chaplain of Newgate, an excellent, kind-hearted man, to whom Mrs. Mason had confided her sad story.  I immediately hastened to the prison; and in a long interview with her, elicited the foregoing statement.  I readily assured her that all which legal skill could do to extricate her from the awful position in which she stood, the gravity of which I did not affect to conceal, should be done.  The offence with which she was charged had supplied the scaffold with numberless victims; and tradesmen were more than ever clamorous for the stern execution of a law which, spite of experience, they still regarded as the only safeguard of their property.  My wife was overwhelmed with grief; and in her anxiety to save her unhappy foster-sister, sought, without my knowledge, an interview with the prosecutor, in the hope of inducing him not to press the charge.  Her efforts were unavailing.  He had suffered much, he said, from such practices, and was “upon principle” determined to make an example of every offender he could catch.  As to the plea that the husband had been forcibly carried off by a pressgang, it was absurd; for what would become of the property of tradesmen if the wife of every sailor so entrapped were to be allowed to plunder shops with impunity?  This magnificent reasoning was of course unanswerable; and the rebuked petitioner abandoned her bootless errand in despair.  Messrs. Roberts, I should have mentioned, had by some accident discovered the nature of the misfortune which had befallen their officer, and had already made urgent application to the Admiralty for his release.

The Old Bailey sessions did not come on for some time:  I, however, took care to secure at once, as I did not myself practice in that court, the highest talent which its bar afforded.  Willy, who had been placed in a workhouse by the authorities, we had properly taken care of till he could be restored to his mother; or, in the event of her conviction, to his relatives in Devonshire.