out of bed and stood before her. "Give me your hands," she said, but I put them behind me, when slash across my shoulders came six or seven smart strokes of her whip, and screaming I put out my hands, which she fastened together with a cord at the wrists. Then making me lie down across the foot of the bed face downwards, she very quietly and deliberately, putting her left hand round my waist, gave me a shower of smart slaps with her open right hand—a proceding which so surprised and humiliated my proud self that I could hardly believe in my own identity, and as I screamed and struggled, she merely said: "This is for not doing now as I told you, and it will not only punish you for that, but will increase the pain of the birching I am now going to give you."
Mrs. — then, as I lay, spoke to me for a few minutes with great kindness and earnestness. She then rose, took the birch in her right hand, and stooping over me, pressed her left hand tightly on my shoulder so as to hold me as if I were in a vice; then raising the birch, I could hear it whizz in the air, and oh, how terrible it felt as it came down, and as its repeated strokes
