entence, many innocent lives were sacrificed. Judge Sewall was a
steadfast Christian, a man deeply introspective, absolutely upright, and
painfully conscientious. As years passed by, and all superstitious
excitement was dead, many of the so-called victims confessed their
fraud, and in the light of these confessions, and with calmer judgment,
and years of unshrinking thought, Judge Sewall became convinced that his
decisions had been unjust, his condemnation cruel, and his sentences
appallingly awful. Though his public confession and recantation was
bitterly opposed by his fellow judge, Stoughton, he sent to his minister
a written confession of his misjudgment, his remorse, his sorrow. It was
read aloud at the Sabbath service in the Boston church while the
white-haired Judge stood in the face of the whole congregation with
bowed head and aching heart. For his self-abnegation he has been
honored in story and verse; honored more in his time of penance than in
the many positions of trust and dignity bestowed on him by his
fellow-citizens.

[Illustration: Ryding the Wooden-Horse]

X

MILITARY PUNISHMENTS

An English writer of the seventeenth century, one Gittins, says with a
burst of noble and eloquent sentiment: "A soldier should fear only God
and Dishonour." Writing with candor he might have added, "but the
English soldier fears only his officers." The shocking and frequent
cruelty practiced in the English army is now a thing of the past, though
it lasted to our own day in the form of bitter and protracted floggings.
It is useless to describe one of these military floggings, and
superfluous as well, when an absolutely classic description, such as
Somerville's, in his _Autobiography of a Workingman_, can be read by
all. He writes with stinging, burning words of the punishment of a
hundred lashes which he received during his service in the British army,
and his graphic sentences cut like the "cat"--we seem to see in lurid
outlines the silent, motionless, glittering regiment drawn up in a
square four rows deep; the unmoved and indifferent officers, all men of
gentle birth and liberal education, but brutalized and inhuman, standing
within these lines and near the cruel stake; the impassive quartermaster
marking with leisurely and unmoved exactness every powerful, agonizing
lash of the bloody whip as it descended on the bare back of a brave
British soldier, without one sign of protest or scarce of interest from
an