But a change was at hand, for in the evening, when we had just gone to our bedrooms, Mrs. — again came to me, and said: ‘Miss W., you will to-night occupy the dressing-room adjoining my room. I will show you the way.” I was half inclined to disobey. However, I followed my governess through her bedroom and across a small sitting-room which opened out of it into a room comfortably furnished, in which was a small low bed, and telling me to undress and go to bed, Mrs. — left me, locking the door after her. I had been in bed about a quarter of an hour when Mrs. — came to me, holding in her hand a long birchrod. Placing the rod and the candlestick on the table, she told me that but one course was now open to her after my behaviour, and that she was going to flog me, and I was to get up. But though the twigs of the birch stood out in ominous shadow in front of the candlestick, and while I noted the thin, closely wrapped bundle of that rod and its fanlike top, I never attempted to obey. Three times she told me to get up, but I stirred not. Mrs. — returned to her own room, and came back with a small thin riding whip, and said: ‘Must I use this?” There was something about her which quite awed me—it was more her manner than her tall powerful figure—and as she swung that whip about in her hand I at once stepped out of bed and stood before her. “Give me your hands,” she said, but I put them behind me, when slash across my shoulders came six or seven smart strokes of her whip, and screaming I put out my hands, which she fastened together with a cord at the wrists. Then making me lie down across the foot of the bed face downwards, she very quietly and deliberately, putting her left hand round my waist, gave me a shower of smart slaps with her open right hand—a proceeding which so surprised and humiliated my proud self that I could hardly believe in my own identity, and as I screamed and struggled, she merely said: “This is for not doing _now_ as I told you, and it will not only punish you for _that_, but will increase the pain of the birching I am now going to give you.”