and "Thine forever."

Let us glance now at some of the larger crosses of the Puritan minister.
First came a "young brood" of heretics to torment him. Gorton's
followers were exasperating enough; they had to be confined in irons
separately, one in each town, on pain of death, if they preached their
doctrines,--and of course they preached them. But their offences and
penalties were light, compared with those of the Quakers. When the
Quakers assembled by themselves, their private doors might be broken
open,--a thing which Lord Chatham said the king of England could not do
to any one,--they might be arrested without warrant, tried without jury,
for the first offence be fined, for the second lose one ear, for the
third lose the other ear, and for the fourth be bored with red-hot iron
through the tongue,--though this last penalty remained a dead letter.
They could be stripped to the waist, tied to a cart, and whipped through
town after town,--three women were whipped through eleven towns, eighty
miles,--but afterwards the number was limited to three. Their testimony
was invalid, their families attainted, and those who harbored them were
fined forty shillings an hour. They might be turned out shelterless
among wolves and bears and frosts: they could be branded H for Heretic,
and R for Rogue; they could be sold as slaves; and their graves must not
be fenced to keep off wild beasts, lest their poor afflicted bodies
should find rest there.

Yet in this same age female Quakers had gone as missionaries to Malta
and to Turkey and returned unharmed. No doubt the monks and the Sultan
must have looked on the plain dress much as some clerical gentlemen have
since regarded the Bloomer costume,--and the Inquisition imprisoned the
missionaries, though the Sultan did not. But meanwhile the Quaker women
in New England might be walking to execution with their male