All the three men walked firmly to the scaffold, where they shook hands all round, saying, "Good-bye, old pal, good-bye"--nothing more. The drop was already chalked with their names--Martin in the centre, with Rudge on the right and Baker on the left. The men stepped at once to their places and gave all the assistance they could in the final pinioning and in the adjustment of the nooses. Just before the drop fell Baker cried, "Keep straight, Nellie!" and then the three men died together, without a word of fear or even a quiver or a pallid cheek amongst them. The youth and manly bearing of Baker, and the strong affection of which he was capable, as shown by the way in which his Nellie was always uppermost in his thoughts, affected me very much. His execution was one of the saddest of my many experiences. [Illustration: Mrs. Britland.] _Mary Ann Britland._ I have said that the people who are most cruel and callous in their murderous deeds are often most cowardly after conviction. The class of cruel and callous murderers is quite distinct from that of the violent murderers, like Rudge, Martin and Baker. These men, fighting against the law, fight fairly according to their lights. They take risks and meet the consequences in a straightforward manner. But the cruel and callous class show a cowardice and selfishness of which Rudge, Martin, and Baker were incapable. An instance of this occurs to me in the case of Mary Ann Britland, whom I executed at Strangeways Gaol, Manchester. She was an example of the class of persons to whom the three weeks' respite before death is the greatest possible cruelty. She was condemned for the murder of a woman who had befriended her, and in whose house she was living as a guest at the time of the murder. She was also proved to have murdered her own husband and daughter by the same means, namely, poison. It seems hard to conceive of any adequate motive for such a series of crimes, extending over a considerable time, but a theory was advanced, and supported by her confession, to the effect that she desired to marry the husband of her latest victim. To accomplish this object she first killed her daughter (for what exact reason is not clear, unless she feared that the girl had some suspicion of her design upon the others), then her husband, and finally her friend, who had pitied her lonely and widowed circumstances, and given her food and shelter. The husband of the third victim was tried, with a view to bringing him in as an accomplice, but the investigation showed that he had never shown any friendliness for Mrs. Britland, and that it was clearly impossible that he could have had any connection with the murders. At her trial she was completely unnerved, not by remorse, but by fear. When the verdict was announced, and she was asked if she had anything to say why sentence should not be passed, she burst into tears. During the passing of the sentence she incessantly