short.

Along the wall, ranged up in line, like soldiers facing their captain,
or victims of a hold-up their captor, stood the household
servants--portly Shaw the butler, Beatrice the parlor-maid, Eliza the
"chef-cook"--all, down to the gay young sprig, aforesaid, who, as Martha
had explained to her family in strong disapproval, "was engaged to do
scullerywork, an' then didn't even know how to scull." Before them, in
an attitude of command, not to say menace, stood Radcliffe, brandishing
a carving-knife which, in his cruelly mischievous little hand, became a
weapon full of dangerous possibilities.

"Don't dare to budge, any one of you," he breathed masterfully to his
cowed regiment. "Get back there, you Shaw! An', Beetrice, if you don't
mind me, I'll carve your ear off. You better be afraid of me, all of
you, an' mind what I say, or I'll take this dagger, an' dag the life
out of you! You're all my servants--you're all my slaves! D'you hear
me!"

Evidently they did, and not one of them cared or dared to stir.

For a second Radcliffe faced them in silence, before beginning to march
Napoleonically back and forth, his savage young eye alert, his naughty
hand brandishing the knife threateningly. A second, and then, suddenly,
without warning, the scene changed, and Radcliffe was a squirming,
wriggling little boy, shorn of his power, grasped firmly in a grip from
which there was no chance of escape.

"Shame on you!" exclaimed Martha indignantly, addressing the spellbound
line, staring at her blankly. "Shame on you! To stand there gawkin', an'
never raisin' a finger to this poor little fella, an' him just perishin'
for the touch of a real mother's hand. Get out of this--the whole crowd
o' you," and before the force of her righteous wrath they fled as chaff
before the wind. Then, quick as the automatic click of a monstrous
spring, the hitherto unknown--the supposed-to-be-impossible--befell
Radcliffe Sherman. He was treated as if he had been an iron girder on
which the massive clutch of a steam-lift had fastened. He was raised,
lowered, laid across what seemed to be two moveless iron trestles, and
then the weight as of a mighty, relentless paddle, beat down upon him
once, twice, thrice--and he knew what it was to suffer.

The whole thing was so utterly novel, so absolutely unexpected, that for
the first instant he was positively stunned with surprise. Then the
knowledge that he was being spanked, that an unspeakable indign