Quaker Mary Dyer hanged in Boston, 1660
... She was offered her life, as she stood on the ladder of the gallows, if she would return home. "Nay I cannot," was her firm answer. "In obedience to the will of the Lord God I came and in His will I abide faithful to death."
... Her death showed, as did also the deaths of the other martyrs, that whether right or wrong in their fundamental beliefs, a people had come to these shores who were not to be turned aside by any dangers or terrors which mortal man could devise...