Here he lay till six a.m., then sent for a smith who knocked off his irons, “and took them away with him for his pains.” Then he sent for his wife, who came to him; but while they were at breakfast, hearing a noise in the yard he made off, and took refuge at Mrs. Newman’s, “the sign of the Blackboy, Millbank; there I was kept private and locked up four days alone and no soul by myself.” Venturing out on the fifth day he heard they were in pursuit of him, and again took refuge, this time in the house of a Mrs. Franklin. From thence he despatched a shoemaker with a message to his wife, and letters to two gentlemen in the city. But the messenger betrayed him to the Newgate officers, and in about an hour “the house was beset. I hid myself,” says Malden,[139] “behind the shutters in the yard, and my wife was drinking tea in the house. The keepers seeing her, cried, ‘Your humble servant, madam; where is your spouse?’ I heard them, and knowing I was not safe, endeavoured to get over a wall, when some of them espyed me, crying, ‘Here he is!’ upon which they immediately laid hold of me, carried me back to Newgate, put me into the old condemned hold as the strongest place, and stapled me down to the floor.” Nothing daunted by this first failure he resolved to attempt a second escape. A fellow-prisoner conveyed a knife to him, and on the night of June 6th, 1737, he began to saw the staple to which he was fastened in two. His own story is worth quoting. “I worked through it with much difficulty, and with one of my irons wrenched it open and got it loose. Then I took down, with the assistance of my knife, a stone in front of the seat in the corner of the condemned hold: when I had got the stone down, I found there was a row of strong iron bars under the seat through which I could not get, so I was obliged to work under these bars and open a passage below them. To do this I had no tool but my old knife, and in doing the work my nails were torn off the ends of my fingers, and my hands were in a dreadful, miserable condition. At last I opened a hole just big enough for me to squeeze through, and in I went head foremost, but one of my legs, my irons being on, stuck very fast in the hole, and by this leg I hung in the inside of the vault with my head downward for half an hour or more. I thought I should be stifled in this sad position, and was just going to call out for help when, turning myself up, I happened to reach the bars. I took fast hold of them by one hand, and with the other disengaged my leg to get it out of the hole.”