" It contained these words:--
"Sir,--I know you to be a sensible and a considerate magistrate, and one
who, as such, will be content to worship God, though the devil bid you. I
therefore expect that, notwithstanding the signature of this letter
acknowledges my share in an action, which, in a proper time and place, I
would not fear either to avow or to justify, you will not on that account
reject what evidence I place before you. The clergyman, Butler, is
innocent of all but involuntary presence at an action which he wanted
spirit to approve of, and from which he endeavoured, with his best set
phrases, to dissuade us. But it was not for him that it is my hint to
speak. There is a woman in your jail, fallen under the edge of a law so
cruel, that it has hung by the wall like unsecured armour, for twenty
years, and is now brought down and whetted to spill the blood of the most
beautiful and most innocent creature whom the walls of a prison ever
girdled in. Her sister knows of her innocence, as she communicated to her
that she was betrayed by a villain.--O that high Heaven
Would put in every honest hand a whip,
To scourge me such a villain through the world!
"I write distractedly--But this girl--this Jeanie Deans, is a peevish
puritan, superstitious and scrupulous after the manner of her sect; and I
pray your honour, for so my phrase must go, to press upon her, that her
sister's life depends upon her testimony.
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