Recompense– Ames repays people he steals from with other stolen goods. He does not elaborate on why he chooses to recompense certain people for their losses. Maybe he only repays people who know he stole from him so they won’t report him to the authorities, but still it seems like a stranger bartering system. Perhaps, because he seems to steal almost compulsively, he feels bad about his thefts later. He says at one point “but though I lived such a wicked life, it was not without some severe checks of conscience. For after I had stolen, I had been so distressed at times, as to be obliged to go back and throw the stolen goods at the door, or into the yard, that the owners might have them again.”
Personalization– In these narratives, it is common for the condemned to read Bible passages and think that God is speaking directly to them. These passages usually have something to do with redemption. Ames says of one passage “[I] could not help looking on this as God’s gracious promise to me, and I tho’t that as I knew God could not lie, if I would not believe this, I would believe nothing.”
Blame– A lot of the texts vilify minorities and women, but Ames blatantly blames women for his stealing (although the two are completely unrelated). He warns youth against “bad women” who he says “have undone many, and by whom I have suffered much, the unlawful intercourse with them I have found by sad experience, leading to almost every sin.” He makes it sound as though he were tricked into intercourse by these women.