en it did not suit the
convenience of the master to enforce the full term of a school-day.
Upon certain Saturdays, moreover, one in each month, I think, a
repetition was required of all the questions and proofs that had been,
or ought to have been, learned since the last observance of the same
sort.

Now the day in question was one of these of accumulated labour, and
Alec Forbes only succeeded in bringing proof of his inability for the
task, and was in consequence condemned "to be keepit in"--a trial hard
enough for one whose chief delights were the open air and the active
exertion of every bodily power.

Annie caught sight of his mortified countenance, the expression of
which, though she had not heard his doom, so filled her with concern
and indignation, that--her eyes and thoughts fixed upon him, at the
other end of the class--she did not know when her turn came, but
allowed the master to stand before her in bootless expectation. He did
not interrupt her, but with a refinement of cruelty that ought to have
done him credit in his own eyes, waited till the universal silence had
at length aroused Annie to self-consciousness and a sense of
annihilating confusion. Then, with a smile on his thin lips, but a
lowering thunder-cloud on his brow, he repeated the question:

"What doth every sin deserve?"

Annie, bewildered, and burning with shame at finding herself the core
of the silence--feeling is if her poor little spirit stood there naked
to the scoffs and jeers around--could not recall a word of the answer
given in the Catechism. So, in her bewilderment, she fell back on her
common sense and experience, which, she ought to have known, had
nothing to do with the matter in hand.

"What doth every sin deserve?" again repeated the tyrant.

"A lickin'," whimpered Annie, and burst into tears.

The master seemed much inclined to consider her condemned out of her
own mouth, and give her a whipping at once; for it argued more than
ignorance to answer _a whipping_, instead of _the wrath and curse of
God_, &c., &c., as plainly set down in the Scotch Targum. But
reflecting, perhaps, that she was a girl, and a little one, and that
although it would be more gratification to him to whip her, it might be
equal suffering to her to be _kept in_, he gave that side wave of his
head which sealed the culprit's doom, and Annie took her place among
the condemned, with a flutter of joy at her heart that Alec Forbes
would not be left witho