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 penalinflictionmight be expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingalefrom stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantialpersons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarserfibrein 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 country-women; and the beef and aleof their native land, with a moral diet not a whitmore refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddycheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundityof speech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startleus at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume of tone.
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