A Busy Year at the Old Squire's

by C. A. Stephens

Feruling with the ruler was for ordinary, miscellaneous offenses; but Czar Brench had more picturesque punishments for the six or seven "deadly sins." If you dropped a book, he would instantly cry, "Pick up that book and fetch it to me!" Then, when you came forward, he would say, "Take it in your right hand. Face the school. Hold it out straight, full stretch, and keep it there till I tell you to lower it."

Oh, how heavy that book soon got to be! And when Czar Brench calmly went on hearing lessons and apparently forgot you there, the discomfort soon became torture. Your arm would droop lower and lower, until Czar Brench's eye would fall on you, and he would say quietly, "Straight out, there!"

There were many terribly tired arms at our school that winter!

But holding books at arm's length was a far milder penalty than "sitting on nothing," which was Czar Brench's specially devised punishment for those who shuffled uneasily on those hard old benches during study hours.

"Aha, there, my boy!" he would cry. "If you cannot sit still on that bench, come right out here and sit on nothing."

Setting a stool against the wall, he would order the pupil to sit down on it with his back pressing against the wall. Then he would remove the stool, leaving the offender in a sitting posture, with his back to the wall and his knees flexed. By the time the victim had been there ten minutes, he wished never to repeat the experience. I know whereof I speak, for I "sat on nothing" three times that winter.

Czar Brench's most picturesque, not to say bizarre, punishment was for buzzing lips. Many of us, studying hard to get our lessons, were very likely to make sounds with our lips, and in the silence of that schoolroom the least little lisp was sure to reach the master's ear.

"Didn't I hear a buzzer then?" he would ask in his softest tone, raising his finger to point to the offender. "Ah, yes. It is—it is you! Come out here. Those lips need a lesson."

The lesson consisted in your standing, facing the school, with your mouth propped open. The props were of wood, and were one or two inches long, for small or large "buzzers."

I remember one day when six boys—and I believe one girl—stood facing the school with their mouths propped open at full stretch, each gripping a book and trying to study! Inveterate "buzzers"—those who had been called out two or three times—had not only to face the school with props in their mouths but to mount and stand on top of the master's desk.