Word: hags
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...hag: A girl who smokes...
...madonnas suckling solemn-faced infants, martyrs suffering horrible tortures with quiet dignity, earnest, humorless burghers and princes and their doll-faced wives. Single exception to the prevailing solemnity was a grimly humorous allegory by Painter Hieronymus Bosch (see cut), showing with peasant grotesqueness and a premonition of surrealism the hag-ridden death of an irresolute miser...
...France, the trial itself was the disgrace. There was no gallantry in it, only misery and recrimination and bitter remembrance. But it must be held. Some one, it seemed, must be made the scape goat because France had turned Democracy into a greedy, complacent hag...
...swarm of witnesses were uncovered to swear they had seen that unforgettably hideous face far from London at the time of the crime. Soon it was Elizabeth Canning who was being tried, for perjury. Found guilty, she was exiled to Connecticut. In the two trials, involving 134 witnesses, the hag was clearly proved to have been in a London suburb in January 1753, and at the same time to have been several counties away. This forms "the strangest enigma that ever faced a court of law," says Lawyer Barrett R. Wellington of Troy, N. Y. in The Mystery of Elizabeth...
...Four weeks later she reappeared, bloodstained, gaunt with hunger, clad in rags. Before Magistrate Henry Fielding she told a tale which might have been sliced from his own Tom Jones. She claimed that she was seized by two ruffians, robbed, dragged to a bawdyhouse where a gypsy hag with a nightmare face ripped her stays (value: 10/) from her, locked her up in the loft. There Elizabeth languished until she escaped through a boarded window. The gypsy crone was tried before the Lord Mayor of London, condemned to the gallows...