On the Sunday before the appointed day, the High Church clergy took care to manifest their opinions, perhaps to exhibit their charitable feelings, by asking their congregations to join with them in prayers for the condemned lords. The scene that ensued was solemn and impressive, scarcely marred by the angry flinging-out of church of some exasperated Whig hastening home to write to the papers. Pray for lords like these, was the cry. ‘Are their souls dearer to God than the souls of thieves and murderers who die monthly at the common place of execution?’ On the other hand, there were Tory partizans among the lower classes who thought practice might as well follow praying. They made a feeble attempt on the Sunday night to pull down the scaffold which was erected in readiness for the tragedy on Tower Hill. The sight of a solitary soldier made them desist. As anyone caught would certainly have been hanged, and as anyone who tarried might have been shot, the Jacobite sympathisers cleared away from the hill with remarkable alacrity. [Sidenote: _LADY NITHSDALE._] On the evening before the execution a little drama was being performed, the success of which is altogether inexplicable. Lady Nithsdale, accompanied by Mrs. Mills, in whose house she lodged, and by a Mrs. Morgan, _alias_ Hilton, went in a hackney-coach to the Tower. The last two went in the character of friends of Lord Nithsdale, introduced by the wife to take their last farewell. They were really two confederates suddenly secured to further the plan for my lord’s escape. To keep them from reflection, Lady Nithsdale talked incessantly as they proceeded on their way. ◆[Sidenote: _CHANGES OF DRESS._]◆ Mrs. Mills, who was ‘in the family way,’ and of the figure as well as height of Lord Nithsdale, wore clothes which she was to give up to the prisoner, dressed in which he was to attempt to make his escape! The tall and slender Morgan wore, under her riding hood, a second hood and other clothes in which Mrs. Mills was to be attired, after giving up her own dress to my lord. ‘The poor guard were not so strictly on the watch as they had been,’ wrote the countess, in after years, to her sister. They seem really to have been rather confederates than guards. The only restraint was that the supposed lady-friends should be introduced one at a time. Mrs. Morgan was the first to be taken in. During the brief time she was in Lord Nithsdale’s room, she divested herself of the garments in which Mrs. Mills (after the latter lady should have given up her own for Lord Nithsdale’s use) was to leave the Tower. Mrs. Morgan was then conducted to the gate by the countess who, feigning to be anxious for the arrival of her maid, Evans, implored Mrs. Morgan to send her forthwith. Mrs. Morgan having been thus got rid of, Lady Nithsdale took Mrs. Mills by the hand and led her, with her face buried in her handkerchief, as it had been all the time she had been waiting, to the chamber in which the