Queen of her domain, she held the field against all comers. Many were her challengers for notoriety, but they came and went, the grave closed over them, yet she held on. Her movements were regular as the motions of the planets. From police court to prison, from prison to the streets, thence again to the court, was the regular order of her life. Her quips and cranks, ready wit, and cool assurance, made her dear to reporters, and Jane became national property.
Vain to an extraordinary extent, she dearly prized the notoriety that a police court afforded her. To her the hum of amused wonder and scarcely suppressed laughter when ‘No. 12, Jane Cakebread, your worship,’ was announced by the gaoler was the very breath of life, and proved ample compensation for the discomfort of the cells. But by no means did she make herself miserable in the cells, for times and again have I seen her in those cells with her little hymn-book, singing softly her old favourite hymns, or repeating aloud choice portions of the Bible; for she had a capital memory. Many a time has she repeated to me two chapters from the Book of Job which she had learned forty years before. Again and again I have seen her on her knees in the cells, repeating her little prayers; yet there was not the faintest suspicion of the hypocrite about her. I have seen her rise from her knees and pour out floods of blasphemy and obscenity if she had been in the least disturbed in her devotions. That was Jane all over; from Job to foul obscenity, from hymns to coarse blasphemy, from prayer to violent temper, were to her natural transitions, occupying but one moment of time. The changes in her facial expression, even when sober and at liberty, were most extraordinary. One had only to look into that face, with its little, twinkling eyes, its square-set, powerful jaw, and its determined mouth, to see in rapid succession all the passions and powers that dwelt in her strange body and mysterious mind reflected in it. Put a little child before her, and that hard mouth would soften, and the whole face would brighten up. ‘Bless its dear little heart!’ she would say. ‘Shall I sing it a little hymn?’ And she would begin in her thin old voice to sing to the child. In the middle of a verse she would leave off abruptly to pour out the vials of wrath upon some imaginary offender--and her wrath was something to be remembered.