"Take off your other shoe and stocking," said Sharp, in an authoritative tone.
Henry obeyed, trembling all the while. This foot exhibited nearly the same marks of the progress of the painful disease.
"What have you done for it?" asked Sharp, looking Henry in the face with a scowl.
"Nothing but put a little candle-grease on it at night before I went to bed," replied the child.
"Come out here with me. I'll doctor you," said his master, turning away and disappearing through the back door. Henry followed as quickly as he could walk on his bare feet, that seemed ready to give way under him at every step. When he got as far as the kitchen, he found Sharp waiting for him in the door.
"Here, jump out into that snow-bank!" said he, pointing to a pile of snow that had been shovelled up only that morning, after a fall through the night, and lay loose and high.
The poor boy looked down at his crippled, and, indeed, bleeding feet, and, as may well be supposed, hesitated to comply with the peremptory order.
"Do you hear, sir?" exclaimed his master seizing him by the collar, and pushing him out into the yard. Then catching him by one arm, he set him in the centre of the snow-bank, his naked feet and legs going down into it some twelve or eighteen inches.
"Now stand there until I tell you to come out!"
The child did not scream, for he had already learned to bear pain, without uttering even the natural language of suffering; although the agony he endured for the next minute was terrible. At the end of that time, a motion of the head of his master gave him to understand that the ordeal was over.