[The Complete Works of Whittier by John Greenleaf Whittier]@TWC D-Link bookThe Complete Works of Whittier INTRODUCTION 341/376
They were presently turned off, and then the woman went up the ladder, and they tied her coats down to her feet, and put the halter on her neck, and, lacking a handkerchief to tie over her face, the minister lent the hangman his.
Just then your Uncle Rawson comes a-riding up to the gallows, waving his hand, and crying out, 'Stop! she is reprieved!' So they took her down, although she said she was ready to die as her brethren did, unless they would undo their bloody laws.
I heard Captain Oliver tell her it was for her son's sake that she was spared.
So they took her to jail, and after a time sent her back to her husband in Rhode Island, which was a favor she did in no wise deserve; but good Governor Endicott, much as he did abhor these people, sought not their lives, and spared no pains to get them peaceably out the country; but they were a stubborn crew, and must needs run their necks into the halter, as did this same woman; for, coming back again, under pretence of pleading for the repeal of the laws against Quakers, she was not long after put to death.
The excellent Mr. Wilson made a brave ballad on the hanging, which I have heard the boys in the street sing many a time." A great number, both men and women, were--"whipped and put in the stocks," continued the woman, "and I once beheld two of them, one a young and the other an aged woman, in a cold day in winter, tied to the tail of a cart, going through Salem Street, stripped to their waists as naked as they were born, and their backs all covered with red whip- marks; but there was a more pitiful case of one Hored Gardner, a young married woman, with a little child and her nurse, who, coming to Weymouth, was laid hold of and sent to Boston, where both were whipped, and, as I was often at the jail to see the keeper's wife, it so chanced that I was there at the time.
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