The subject of the following narrative was thirty-four years of age when executed. His life evidently had been a wild one. We spoke little about it. Our interviews were wholly taken up with the Word of God. One incident lifted the veil to me: I was turning the leaves of his Testament to find a passage for him, when I noticed two verses crossed out with pencil-mark — they were 1 Corinthians 6:9,10.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It is a part of my past life,” he replied, “but, by the blood of Jesus, all is crossed out, and here is where I stand now.” His finger pointed me to the verse just following, which was encircled with a pencil-mark also.
Five years before his execution, he was convicted of house-breaking, with attempt to rob, and sentenced to fourteen years at the penitentiary at Kingston, Canada. Here, after five years of his term had expired, he, with a fellow-convict, formed a plan to escape. They were both employed at a limekiln, a short distance from the penitentiary walls, under a guard. At an hour when no one was near, one was to attract the guard’s attention in some way, while the other was to strike a blow sufficient to overpower him. They were then to bind him hand and foot, and flee. For some time the heart failed them, but at last, growing desperate, while his fellow-prisoner was amusing the guard with some carved bones, Mann struck the blow which killed the guard. They fled, but were taken again a short time after. This was in July, at which time I came to Kingston with the gospel.
After the judgment which sent Mann to the scaffold and his fellow-prisoner back to the penitentiary, Mann was transmitted to the common jail, where I first met him. This was in November.
A few quotations from the Toronto Daily Globe, whose correspondent, with several other gentlemen, visited Mann the day before his execution, will give a fair idea of his person: “Mann’s cell was next visited. A single glance at him showed he was a different man altogether from his fellow-prisoner (one who was hanged at the same time with him for poisoning his wife). He has a light, keen, piercing eye, and intellectual-looking forehead, and, in his conversation, showed a clear head and an active mind. There is no doubt that, had he received proper training from his youth, he could have been a man above the ordinary stamp, but he told Mr. O’Reilly he had received no education, secular or religious, save some six months at a public school, and until he grew up, had not even an idea of God. . . . Mann’s visitors parted with him, when, with painful emotions, they felt that he, with an acute intellect, a courageous and energetic disposition, and a resolute spirit, might have been an honored member of society, but his associations from childhood were evil, and only evil, and he goes to the scaffold at the early age of thirty-four years.”
The reader will soon discover that the object of the narrative is not to satisfy curiosity. Christ has grown more real, and self more abhorred, since it was first published. With what gladness, therefore, every trace of self in it, as in every other service, would be expunged, that Christ might more fully appear! But Christ and, by Him, “the grace of God that bringeth salvation” were then, as now, the object, and God has been pleased to own it far beyond all expectations. P. J. L.