Birch rods were tauntingly sold on London streets with a cry by pedlers of "Buy my fine Jemmies; Buy my London Tartars." Even that miserable _Dyves Pragmaticus_ enumerated "Fyne Rod for Children of Wyllow and Burche" among his wares. A crowning insult was charging the cost of birch rod on schoolboys' bills; and in some cases making the boy pay for the birch out of his scant spending money. Birch trees were plentiful in America--and whippings too. Scholars in New England were not permitted to forget the methods of discipline of "the good old days." Massachusetts schools resounded with strokes of the rod. Varied instruments of chastisement were known, from "A besomme of byrche for babes verye fit To a long lasting lybbet for lubbers as meet." A lybbet was a billet of wood, and the heavy walnut stick of one Boston master well deserved the name. A cruel inquisitor invented an instrument of torture which he termed a flapper. It was a heavy piece of leather six inches in diameter, with a hole in the middle. This was fastened by an edge to a pliable handle. Every stroke on the bare flesh raised a blister the size of the hole in the leather. Equally brutal was the tattling stick, a cat-o'-nine-tails with heavy leather straps. The whipping with this tattling stick was ordered to be done upon "a peaked block"--whatever that may be. That fierce Boston disciplinarian and patriot, Master Lovell, whipped with strong birch rods, and made one culprit mount the back of another scholar to receive his lashing. He called these whippings trouncings, the good old English word of the Elizabethan dramatists. Another brutal Boston master struck his scholars on the head with a ferule, until this was forbidden by the school directors; he then whipped the soles of the scholars' feet, and roared out in an ecstasy of cruelty, "Oh! the Caitiffs! it is good for them." There was sometimes an aftermath of sorrow, when our stern old grandfathers whipped their children at home for being whipped at school, so told Rev. Eliphalet Nott. [Illustration: Whispering Sticks]