Every time he did so the cruel serpent of leather went at him, coiling round his legs with a sudden, hissing swash.

This made him cry, and his tears blinded him so that he could not even see the words which he had been unable to read before.

But he still attempted to go on, and still the instrument of torture went swish-swash round his little thin legs, raising upon them, no doubt, plentiful blue wales, to be revealed, when he was undressed for the night, to the indignant eyes of pitying mother or aunt, who would yet send him back to the school the next morning without fail.
At length either the heart of the master was touched by the sight of his sufferings and repressed weeping, or he saw that he was compelling the impossible; for he stayed execution, and passed on to the next, who was Annie.
It was no wonder that the trembling child, who could read very fairly, should yet, after such an introduction to the ways of school, fail utterly in making anything like coherence of the sentence before her.
What she would have done, had she been left to herself, would have been to take the little boy in her arms and cry too.

As it was, she struggled mightily with her tears, and yet she did not read to much better purpose than the poor boy, who was still busy wiping his eyes with his sleeves, alternately, for he never had had a handkerchief.

But being a new-comer, and a girl to boot, and her long frock affording no facilities for this kind of incentive to learning, she escaped for the time.
It was a dreadful experience of life, though, that first day at school.
Well might the children have prayed with David--"Let us fall now into the hand of the Lord, for his mercies are great; and let us not fall into the hand of man." And well might the children at many another school respond with a loud _Amen_! At one o'clock they were dismissed, and went home to dinner, to return at three.
In the afternoon she was set to make figures on a slate.