Curiosities of Olden TimesBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
Curiosities of Olden Times
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Curiosities and wonders
“Then, before he died, for eighteen days he was tortured with excessive
cruelty. On the first day he was taken into the public square, where
there was a caldron of boiling oil, into which was thrust the arm which
had dealt the blow. On the morrow this arm was chopped off, and it fell at
his feet. He calmly moved it with his foot, and pushed it before him down
from the scaffold. On the third day his breast and the front of his arm
were plucked with red-hot pincers; on the following day his back and the
back of his arm, and legs, were treated in the same manner. This was
continued for eighteen days, and after each torture he was conducted back
to prison, he all the while enduring his sufferings with great constancy.
The greatest torture of all that he endured, except death, was when he was
bound naked in the middle of the square, and around him at a little
distance waggon-loads of charcoal were set on fire, and thus he was
wrapped in flame. The poor sufferer bore the roasting for a long while,
and then at last he lost patience and cried out; whereupon he was removed.
For the final torture he was broken on the wheel, but he did not die at
once, for they had only broken his legs and arms, so as to make him
linger. Thus he lived for six hours, imploring some one to bring him a
drop of water, but no one had the courage to give it him. At length the
officer was entreated to put an end to this scene, and to strangle him,
lest he should die in despair, and so his soul perish. The executioner
approached, and when close to him asked how he felt. The tortured man
replied, ‘As you left me.’ But when the cord was produced to be put round
his neck, he raised himself, as though fearing death, as he had not feared
it before, and said to the executioner:--‘Ah! pray leave me alone. Do not
torture me any more! Pray let me die as I am!’ So having been strangled,
his life closed. Awful were the torments he endured!”
WHAT ARE WOMEN MADE OF?
In the palmy days of childhood we were taught in nursery jingle, and we
implicitly believed, that little girls were made of
Sugar and spice
And all that’s nice.
But, growing older, we learned to our disappointment that they were
produced from Adam’s rib; and when we asked why woman was made of that
particular bone, we were told because it was the most crooked in Adam’s
body.
“Observe the result,” preached Jean Raulin, in the beginning of the
sixteenth century: “man, composed of clay, is silent and ponderous; but
woman gives evidence of her osseous origin by the rattle she keeps up.
Move a sack of earth and it makes no noise; touch a bag of bones and you
are deafened with the clitter-clatter.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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