eased,
found it impossible to please him.

Now there had come to the school, about a fortnight before, two
unhappy-looking little twin orphans, with white thin faces, and bones
in their clothes instead of legs and arms, committed to the mercies of
Mr Malison by their grandfather. Bent into all the angles of a
grasshopper, and lean with ancient poverty, the old man tottered away
with his stick in one hand, stretched far out to support his stooping
frame, and carried in the other the caps of the two forsaken urchins,
saying, as he went, in a quavering, croaking voice,

"I'll jist tak them wi' me, or they'll no be fit for the Sawbath aboon
a fortnicht. They're terrible laddies to blaud (spoil) their claes!"

Turning with difficulty when he had reached the door, he added:

"Noo ye jist gie them their whups weel, Master Mailison, for ye ken
that he that spareth the rod blaudeth the bairn."

Thus authorized, Malison certainly did "gie them their whups weel."
Before the day was over they had both lain shrieking on the floor under
the torture of the lash. And such poor half-clothed, half-fed creatures
they were, and looked so pitiful and cowed, that one cannot help
thinking it must have been for his own glory rather than their good
that he treated them thus.

But, in justice to Malison, another fact must be mentioned, which,
although inconsistent with the one just recorded, was in perfect
consistency with the theological subsoil whence both sprang. After
about a week, during which they had been whipt almost every day, the
orphans came to school with a cold and a terrible cough. Then his
observant pupils saw the man who was both cruel judge and cruel
executioner, feeding his victims with liquorice till their faces were
stained with its exuberance.

The old habits of severity, which had been in some measure intermitted,
had returned upon him with gathered strength, and this day Anne was to
be one of the victims. For although he would not dare to whip her, he
was about to incur the shame of making this day, pervaded as it was,
through all its spaces of time and light, with the fumes of the sermon
she had heard the night before, the most wretched day that Anne's sad
life had yet seen. Indeed, although she afterwards passed many more
sorrowful days, she never had to pass one so utterly miserable. The
spirits of the pit seemed to have broken loose and filled Murdoch
Malison's school-room with the stench of their fire and brim