Relation of My Imprisonment Read Free Page A

to, there to wither and die. This possibility, nay, this likelihood! grieved me, and I would determine at once to provide him with the name of one of those among us who would build him a coffin, when, as I paced my cell waiting for my jailor to make his evening round and appear to me, it would seem to me that his request for information, such as the name of one who would build him a coffin, was but a subtle ruse designed to induce me to expose and incriminate and thereby condemn one of my beloved brethren to the fate I now endured. And thus I would close my mind as if it were a fist, and I would swear never to reveal the names of my fellow worshippers of the dead, even if tortured and brought to the very gateway of death itself. I had no fear of torture in those years, any more than I do today, for I was filled with the knowledge that if one among the living were to bring me to the very gateway of death and there threaten to hurl me through, it would be as if he were threatening to hurl me into the arms of my dead parents and long-departed ancestors, and I would at such a moment urge him onward, not to confound him, as I am sure it would do, but so as to end this agony of separation.
    While I was yet enduring this quandary with regard to the question of the conversion of my jailor John Bethel, as it was now some weeks beyond the second quarter-sessions of the meeting of the justices of the parish for the purposes of trying all those previously indicted and not yet tried in public court and still I had not yet been called forth so to be tried, though I continued to languish in jail fully as if I had indeed been tried and convicted of those crimes for which I had merely been indicted and had not confessed (except as to argue against the legitimacy of the laws which prohibit acts of worship of the dead such as my brethren are known to participate in), came the time of the solstice. Now at the solstice there is usually a general releasement of divers prisoners, by virtue since ancient days of the high feelings surrounding the event, in which privilege I also should have had my share. But they would not take me for a convicted person, unless I were willing to sue out a pardon (as they called it), by means of which I would recant all my previous statements and activities as had got me indicted in the first place. Therefore, since I was no more willing under these new circumstances to recant and deny than I had been when under more durable and oppressing circumstances twenty weeks before, I could have no benefit of the solstice. Whereupon, while I continued in prison, my good wife went unto the several justices, that I might be heard and that they would impartially take my case into public consideration.
    There were three, and the first that my wife did plead unto was Judge Hale, who was celebrated for his learning and deep probity and who was known for his leniency towards dissenters of various sorts. He very mildly received her, telling her that he would do her and me the best good he could, but he feared, said he, that he could do none.
    The following day, lest the judges should, by the multitude of their business, forget me, she did throw another petition onto the table of Judge Twisdom, who, when he saw it and had read it through, snapped her up and angrily informed her that I was a convicted person already and could not be released unless I would promise to make no more coffins and not to teach others, &c.
    After this disappointment, she went unto Judge Bester, who, in the mild presence of Judge Hale, stood and declared loudly and angrily that I was convicted by the court and that I was a hot spirited fellow, whereat he waved the petition in the air above his head and shouted that he would not meddle therewith.
    But yet my wife, being encouraged by the seeming kindly face and manner of Judge Hale, did persist, saying that I had been indicted merely and had confessed to no crime and had not been tried, yet I was both confined to