ncheon she set to work again, and called up all the cruel
schoolmasters--whole regiments and brigades of them; and when she saw
them, she frowned most terribly, and set to work in earnest, as if the
best part of the day's work was to come. More than half of them were
nasty, dirty, frowzy, grubby, smelly old monks, who, because they dare
not hit a man of their own size, amused themselves with beating little
children instead; as you may see in the picture of old Pope Gregory
(good man and true though he was, when he meddled with things which he
did understand), teaching children to sing their fa-fa-mi-fa with a
cat-o'-nine-tails under his chair: but, because they never had any
children of their own, they took into their heads (as some folks do
still) that they were the only people in the world who knew how to
manage children: and they first brought into England, in the old
Anglo-Saxon times, the fashion of treating free boys, and girls too,
worse than you would treat a dog or a horse: but Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid
has caught them all long ago; and given them many a taste of their own
rods; and much good may it do them.

And she boxed their ears, and thumped them over the head with rulers,
and pandied their hands with canes, and told them that they told
stories, and were this and that bad sort of people; and the more they
were very indignant, and stood upon their honour, and declared they told
the truth, the more she declared they were not, and that they were only
telling lies; and at last she birched them all round soundly with her
great birch-rod and set them each an imposition of three hundred
thousand lines of Hebrew to learn by heart before she came back next
Friday. And at that they all cried and howled so, that their breaths
came all up through the sea like bubbles out of soda-water; and that is
one reason of the bubbles in the sea. There are others: but that is the
one which principally concerns little boys. And by that time she was so
tired that she was glad to stop; and, indeed, she had done a very good
day's work.

Tom did not quite dislike the old lady: but he could not help thinking
her a little spiteful--and no wonder if she was, poor old soul; for if
she has to wait to grow handsome till people do as they would be done
by, she will have to wait a very long time.

Poor old Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid! she has a great deal of hard work before
her, and had better have been born a washerwoman, and stood over a tub
all