Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die. Watch all and pray, the hour is drawing near When you before th’ Almighty must appear. Examine well yourselves; in time repent, That you may not th’ eternal flames be sent. And when St. ’Pulcre’s bell to-morrow tolls, The Lord have mercy on your souls! Past twelve o’clock. Now this iron nightingale was the sexton or his deputy of St. Sepulchre’s, hard by Newgate; and his chant originated thus. In the early seventeenth century there flourished a certain Robert Dowe, “citizen and merchant taylor of London”; he disbursed much of his estate to various charities, and in especial gave one pound six shillings and eight pence yearly to the sexton of St. Sepulchre’s to approach as near as might be to the condemned hold on execution eve, and admonish malefactors of their approaching end, as if they were likely to forget it, or as if “Men in their Condition cou’d have any stomach to Unseasonable Poetry,” so pertinently observes John Hall (executed about 1708), “the late famous and notorious robber,” or rather the Grub Street hack who compiled his _Memoirs_. The rhymes were, so the same veracious authority assures us, “set to the Tune of the Bar-Bell at the Black Dog,” and their reception varied. Hall and his companions (but again you suspect Grub Street) paid in kind with verse equally edifying, and, if possible, still more atrocious. Most, you fancy, turned again to their uneasy slumbers with muttered curses. Not so Sarah Malcolm, condemned in 1733 for the cruel murder of old Mrs. Duncombe, her mistress. An unseasonable pity for the sexton croaking his platitudes in the raw midnight possessed her mad soul. “D’ye hear, Mr. Bellman?” she bawled, “call for a Pint of Wine, and I’ll throw you a Shilling to pay for it.” How instant his changed note as the coin clinked on the pavement! Alas! no record reports him thus again refreshed.