, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the
civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an
Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of
the town, or an idle and vagrant Indian, whom the white man's fire-water had
made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of
the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the
bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows. In either
case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on the part of the
spectators; as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law were almost
identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the
mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and
awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look
for, from such bystanders at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which,
in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be
invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.
    It was a circumstance to be noted, on the summer morning when our story
begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the crowd,
appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might be
expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of
impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping
forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if
occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally,
as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of
old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separated from
them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of
ancestry, every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom,
a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a
character of less force and solidity, than her own. The women, who were now
standing about the prison-door, stood within less than half a century of the
period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable
representative of the sex. They were her countrywomen; and the beef and ale of
their native land, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely
into their composition