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After the bodies of her friends had dangled half an hour they were cut down.

It was then her turn. She ascended the scaffold, refusing the help of the Reverend Mr. Wilson. He followed her and bound his handkerchief over her eyes, a guard in the meantime tying her hands and feet with rawhide.

“Do you renounce the Quakers?” “Never, praise God, His son Jesus Christ, and Anne Hutchinson, His handmaiden–we live by truth!”.

“A reprieve! a reprieve!!” some one shouted. And it was so–Governor Endicott had ordered that this woman be banished, not hanged, unless she again came back to Boston. It was all an arranged trick to frighten the woman thoroughly.

Wilson removed the handkerchief from her eyes. They unbound her feet, and the thongs that held her hands were loosed. She looked down below at the bodies of Robinson and Stevenson lying dead on the grass. She asked that the sentence upon her be carried out. But not so: she was led by guards fifteen miles out into the forest and there liberated.

In a few months she was back in Boston, to see her two grown-up sons, and also to bear witness to the “Inner Light.”

Being brought before Governor Endicott, she was asked, “Are you the same Mary Dyer that was here before?”

“I am the same Mary Dyer.”

“Do you know you are under sentence of death?”

“I do, and I came back to remind you of the unrighteousness of your laws, and to warn you to repent!”

“Are you still a Quaker?”

“I am still reproachfully so called.”

“Tomorrow at nine o’clock I order that you shall be hanged.”

“This sounds like something you said before!”

“Lead her away–away, I say!”

At nine the next morning a vast crowd covered the Common, the shops and stores being closed, by order, for a holiday.

Mr. Wilson again attended the culprit. “Mary Dyer, Mary Dyer!” he called in a loud voice as they stood together on the scaffold. “Mary Dyer, repent, oh, repent, and renounce your heresies!”

And Mary Dyer answered, “Nay, man; I am not now to repent, knowing nothing to repent of!”

“Shall I have the men of God pray for you?”

She looked about curiously, half-smiled, and said, “I see none here.”

“Will you have the people pray for you?”

“Yes; I want all the people to pray for me!”

Again the light was shut out from her eyes, this time forever. Her hands were bound behind her with thongs that cut into her wrists, her feet were tied. She reeled, and the Reverend Mr. Wilson kindly supported her. The noose was adjusted.

“Let us all pray!” said the Reverend Mr. Wilson. So they hanged Mary Dyer in the morning.