This preacher had a strap cut from a side of sole-leather—a strap three feet long, with tails, with which he used to beat up one of his nine or ten children every day ❦ From the baby wearing diapers to a big boy of sixteen, and a girl full-grown, they all got it. I have heard their cries for mercy ring out on a winter’s night when they would run out into the yard to escape their pious parent intent on saving their souls. ¶ Once, one of his daughters, a girl of fifteen, spent ten cents for a blue ribbon, and appeared in church with the ribbon in her hair. Her father saw her from his place in the pulpit. He noted her mark of pride ❦ He denounced her before the congregation, and expressed a hypocritical, pious pain that his own flesh and blood should be guilty of such devilish frivolity. Then he ordered her out of the church. When he got home after the service, he fell upon her with the strap. It pained him, but he felt it was his duty to correct her. The mother was a sick and undone little creature, who twice had twins, and bore at least one baby a year, except the year when her lord and master crossed the plains and got alkalied. And this woman really believed, too, that the children should be punished, and so she had a way of reporting them, thus, “I’ll tell your father on you when he comes home!” She, too, believed in Solomon, and she believed also in her husband’s religion. Poor thing, she was too busy bearing babies to really think anything out for herself ❦ But that Sunday afternoon, when her husband felt it his duty to whip the daughter, the girl ran to the mother and demanded protection. The good man was laying on the strap, anywhere, over the girl’s head, shoulders, her arms and hands, although usually he picked out some choice portion of anatomy and did an artistic job. ¶ Yet this time the girl fought back, and she was only a slim slip of a thing. But now, the womanhood in her was aroused. She felt insulted. She struck, she bit, she scratched, she screamed. And then she ran to her mother ❦ Something in the little yellow mother was now aroused. Her child was being abused. Well, what of it! Hadn’t she seen these whippings going on daily for twenty years? But this was different ❦ The adolescent girl had only given way to her innocent and natural desire to put forth a little color and be beautiful. Now it was brute man against woman. The mother seized the strap. It was jerked through her clenched hands with such violence that it took the skin with it. The preacher had backed the girl into a corner, and with one hand clutching her hair was laying on the strap with the other, in the name of the Lord. The mother was behind. Suddenly she seized a long-handled skillet that was on the kitchen-stove, she swung it with both hands, and it landed square on the man’s head ❦ He was dazed, and turned half-around. Then he got another one. He was getting a kitchen shower. One sharp edge of the skillet skinned one of