by each,
alternately. At the conclusion one drew a strong cord from his pocket,
while the other looked with satisfaction at certain hooks in the
plastering overhead, designed originally for the support of a kitchen
pole, but now destined for another use.

"Don't you dast to tech me!" screamed the false Mrs. Stackridge. "I'm a
secessionist myself, that hates the Union-shriekers wus'n you do, and
I've got a son that's a capting, and a poor lone widder at that!"

"Dat we don't know. What we know is, you tell what we say, or we whip
you. Dat's Captain Shprowl's orders."

"Capting Sprowl! That's my son! my own son! If he sent you, then it's
all right!"

"So we tink. All right." And the soldiers, seizing her, tied her thumbs
as Lysander had taught them, passed the cords over the hook as they had
passed the clothesline over the crossbeam the night before, and drew the
shrieking woman's hands above her head, precisely as they had hauled up
Toby's. They then turned her skirts up over her head, and fastened them.
This also they had been instructed to do by Lysander. It was, you will
say, shameful; for this woman was free and white. Had she been a slave,
with a different complexion, although perhaps quite as white, would it
have been any the less shameful? Answer, ye believers in the divine
rights of slave-masters!

"Now you vill tell?" said the phlegmatic Teutons, measuring out their
whips.

"Go for my son! My son is Capting Sprowl!" gasped the stifled and
terror-stricken widow.

"Dat trick won't do. You shpeak, or we shtrike."

"It is true, it is true! I am Mrs. Sprowl, and my husband is dead, and
my son is Capting Sprowl, and a poor lone widder, that if you strike her
a single blow he'll have you took and hung!"

"If he is your son, den by your own son's orders we whip you. He vill
not hang us for dat. You vill not tell? Den we give you ten lash."

Blow upon blow, shriek upon shriek, followed. The soldiers counted the
strokes aloud, deliberately, conscientiously, as they gave them, "Vun,
two, tree," &c, up to ten. There they stopped. But the screams did not
stop. This punishment, which it was sport to inflict upon a faithful old
negro, which it would have been such a good joke to have bestowed upon
the wife of a stanch Unionist, was no sport, no joke, but altogether a
tragic affair to thy mother, O Lysander!

Then she, who had so often wished that she too owned slaves, that when
she was angry she might have them