Into the Crowd of the Gallows

There is 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. 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 unsuit 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.