The Market-Place

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
had transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate
and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not
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. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone
on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and
ruddy cheeks, 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 rotundity of speech
among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would
startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport
or its volume of tone.