The prisoner mentioned above was continually persecuted by trials of this kind. The most trifling acts were magnified into offences. He was charged with moving something which should not be touched, with leaving a door open, or coughing maliciously to the disturbance of his companions. The evidence was invariably sufficient to convict, and the judge never hesitated to inflict the heaviest penalties. The unfortunate man was compelled at length to adopt the habits of his associates; "by insensible degrees he began to lose his repugnance to their society, caught their flash terms and sung their songs, was admitted to their revels, and acquired, in place of habits of perfect sobriety, a taste for spirits." His wife visited him in Newgate, and wrote a pitiable account of the state in which she found her husband. He was an inmate of the same ward with others of the most dreadful sort, "whose language and manners, whose female associates of the most abandoned description, and the scenes consequent with such lost wretches, prevented me from going inside but seldom, and I used to communicate with him through the bars from the passage." One day he was too ill to come down and meet her. She went up to the ward and found him lying down, "pale as death, very ill, and in a dreadfully dirty state, the wretches making game of him, and enjoying my distress; and I learned he had been up with the others the whole night. Though they could not force him to gamble, he was compelled to drink, and I was obliged afterwards to let him have five shillings to pay his share, otherwise he would have been stripped of his clothes."