Elizabeth Hooton coming from England in 1661, with Joan Brooksup, “they were soon clapt up in prison, and, upon their discharge thence, being driven with the rest two days’ journey into the vast, howling wilderness, and there left ... without necessary provisions.” [Footnote: Besse, ii. 228, 229.] They escaped to Barbadoes. “Upon their coming again to Boston, they were presently apprehended by a constable, an ignorant and furious zealot, who declared, ‘It was his delight, and he could rejoice in following the Quakers to their execution as much as ever.’” Wishing to return once more, she obtained a license from the king to buy a house in any plantation. Though about sixty, she was seized at Dover, where the Rev. Mr. Rayner was settled, put into the stocks, and imprisoned four days in the dead of winter, where she nearly perished from cold. [Footnote: Besse, ii. 229.] Afterward, at Cambridge, she exhorted the people to repentance in the streets, [Footnote: “Repentance! Repentance! A day of howling and sad lamentation is coming upon you all from the Lord.”] and for this crime, which is cited as an outrage to Puritan decorum, [Footnote: _As to Roger Williams_, p. 133.] she was once more apprehended and “imprisoned in a close, stinking dungeon, where there was nothing either to lie down or sit on, where she was kept two days and two nights without bread or water,” and then sentenced to be whipped through three towns. “At Cambridge she was tied to the whipping-post, and lashed with ten stripes with a three-stringed whip, with three knots at the end: At Watertown she was laid on with ten stripes more with rods of willow: At Dedham, in a cold frosty morning, they tortured her aged body with ten stripes more at a cart’s tail.” The peculiar atrocity of flogging from town to town lay in this: that the victim’s wounds became cold between the times of punishment, and in winter sometimes frozen, which made the torture intolerably agonizing. Then, as hanging was impossible, other means were tried to make an end of her: “Thus miserably torn and beaten, they carried her a weary journey on horseback many miles into the wilderness, and toward night left her there among wolves, bears, and other wild beasts, who, though they did sometimes seize on living persons, were yet to her less cruel than the savage-professors of that country. When those who conveyed her thither left her, they said, ‘They thought they should never see her more.’” [Footnote: Besse, ii. 229. See _New England Judged_, p. 413.] The intent to kill is obvious, and yet Elizabeth Hooton suffered less than many of those convicted and sentenced after public indignation had forced the theocracy to adopt what their reverend successors are pleased to call the “humaner policy” of the Vagabond Act. [Footnote: _As to Roger Williams_, p. 134.]