I looked and beheld, and there were a vast number of girls standing in rows. Many of them wore pigtails, and most of them chewed gum.
"Who are they?" I asked my guide.
And he said: "They are the girls who wrote 'Lovely' or 'Perfectly sweet' or 'Horrid old thing!' on the fly-leaves of library books. Some of them used to put comments on the margins of the pages—such as 'Served him right!' or 'There! you mean old cat!'"
"What will happen to them?" I inquired.
"They are to stand up to the neck in a lake of ice cream soda for ten years," he answered.
"That will not be much of a punishment to them," I suggested.
But he told me that I had never tried it, and I could not dispute him.
"The ones over there," he remarked, pointing to a detachment of the girls who were chewing gum more vigorously than the others, "are sentenced for fifteen years in the ice cream soda lake, and moreover they will have hot molasses candy dropped on them at intervals. They are the ones who wrote:
If my name you wish to see
Look on page 93,