There was no danger of that. Mendel's was not the kind of head into which ideas are easily put. He was slow of comprehension, powerful in his instincts, and everything he perceived had to be referred to them. School was to him a perfectly extraneous experience. What he learned there was of so little use to any purpose of which he was conscious, and it could not be shared with his mother. To her schooling was the law of the land. A strange force took her boy from her every day and, as it were, imprisoned him. When he was fourteen he would be free. She must endure his captivity as she had learned to endure so much else. When Mr. Jacobson had gone she said: "There have been boys like that, and a good boy never forgets his father and mother." Mendel looked puzzled and said: "When _I_ drew a picture of teacher he caned me." "Caned you?" cried Golda, horrified. "He often does." "Thrashed you!" cried Golda; "on the hands?" "No," replied Mendel, "on the seat and the back." Golda made him undress, and she gave a gasp of anger when she saw the weals and bruises on his back. "But what did you do?" she cried. "I don't know," answered Mendel. This was true. At school he would suddenly find the teacher towering over him in a fury; he would be told to stay behind, and then he would be flogged. He had suffered more from the humiliation than from the pain inflicted. He could never understand why this fury should descend upon him out of his happy dreams. And now as his mother wept over the marks upon his body the suffering in him was released. All the feeling suppressed in him by his inability to understand came tearing out of him and he shook with rage. He could find no words to express these new emotions, which were terrible and frightened him. Lotte came up and felt the weals on his back with her fingers, and she said: "They don't do that to girls."