punishment. Corporal punishment was administered with either a slipper, the back of a hair-brush, or a ruler. Of rulers there are two kinds, the round and the square. The latter was reserved for aggravated cases.
There is, as already said, a full-length portrait in the ballroom of a Mr. Petty who married one of the Sabines. Then it hung in the dining-room between the two windows looking into the court. One evening I laid a pipe along the side of the room, turned up in the rear of the painting, and I lurked in hiding behind a curtain at the further end of the room, with one end of the pipe to my mouth.
Presently one of the maidservants, carrying a lamp, came into the room, and was passing through it, when, as she was in front of the painting of Mr. Petty in his scarlet coat, I spoke through the tube and made the voice come, as from the picture: "Mary! Mary! This night thy soul shall be required of thee!" Down fell the girl in a faint, and broke the lamp. This caused the application to my person of the square ruler.
The only other occasion of this intimate acquaintance with the square ruler was as follows. My Aunt Emily found me seated one day on the doorstep. Somewhat surprised at my being so quiet and subdued she asked:
"Why are you sitting there, on the stone? You'll get chilled."
"I want to be. I'm burning hot."
"Hot! you don't look red and heated."
"Not the face end of me."
My aunt, being a woman of penetrating ability and great readiness, at once grasped the situation, and asked further what was the occasion of this treatment.
"I put a long cripple last night into Miss Richardson's bed."
"Mercy on me!" exclaimed my aunt, staggering back. "There is only one cripple in the parish, and that is poor Tooke. You do not mean——"
"No," said I, shifting my position to a cooler part of the doorstep. "You do not understand. A long cripple is the Devonshire name for a snake. I found a dead one on the Ramp, and put it in her bed, because I don't like her. She's a sneak."
