It seems that Mr. Hayes had fallen, within a few years of his death, into the company of some who called themselves Free-thinkers and fancy an excellency in their own understandings because they are able to ridicule those things which the rest of the world think sacred. Though it is no great conquest to obtrude the belief of anything whatsoever on persons of small parts and little education, yet they triumph greatly therein and communicate the same honour of boasting in their pupils. Mr. Hayes now and then let fall some rather rash expression, as to his disbelief of the immortality of the soul, and talked in such a manner on religious topics that Mrs. Hayes persuaded Billings and Wood that he was an Atheist, and as he believed his own soul of no greater value than that of a brute beast, there could be no difference between killing him and them. It must be indeed acknowledged that there was no less oddity in such propositions than in those of her husband; however, it prevailed, it seems, with these unfortunate men; and as she had already persuaded them it was no sin, so when they were intoxicated with liquor she found it less difficult than at any other time, to deprive them also of the humanity, and engage them in perpetrating a fact so opposite not only to religion but to the natural tenderness of the human species. Wood, as he yielded to her persuasions with reluctance, so he was the first who showed any true remorse of conscience for that cruel act of which he had been guilty; his confession of it being free and voluntary, and at the same time full and ingenious. Two days after receiving sentence, his constitution began to give way to the violence of a feverish distemper, which by a natural death prevented his execution, he dying in Newgate, in the twenty-eighth year of his age, much more pitied than either Billings or Mrs. Hayes who suffered at Tyburn. And thus with Wood we put a period to the relation of a tragedy which surprised the world exceedingly at the same time it happened, and will doubtless be read with horror in succeeding generations.