These alarming physical symptoms were designed to touch the wellsprings of pity in my mother’s heart and I would thus escape this threatened chastisement, as well as future ones. At last the callers departed and the hour of my doom arrived. She cut two switches from a peach tree and entered the spareroom--that chamber of horrors--and I followed reluctantly with halting steps. When the first blow fell, my instinctive and unconscious activity in endeavoring to avoid it caused it to strike my ear instead of my back at which it was aimed. “The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.” The lusty yell of pain which followed the contact of the switch with my ear caused me to eject the oatmeal; and with succeeding yells vanished all recollection of my carefully laid plans for pseudo-fainting. Boys frequently show great power of invention in minimizing or evading punishment about to be inflicted. One boy pads the seat of his trousers to mitigate the ordeal, where the anticipated weapon is the slipper; another puts on three undershirts where the customary instrument of torture is the switch or rod. Still another, suffering the indignity of being compelled to cut his own switches, has been known to exceed his instructions and cut the castigatory branch half way through in many places. The spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child policy has lost its significance in these latter days. The rod is the emblem of parental ignorance and incapacity. To beat a defenseless child is proof of lack of ability to govern it through moral forces. It is a humiliating admission that one is not qualified for his job as parent. The confirmed user of the rod is either the parent whose neglect of training or wrong methods of training have already produced delinquency in his offspring, or the parent who believes that a liberal application of the birch will atone for his ignorance on the subject of boy-training. To all other parents the resort to the rod is as unnecessary as it is abhorrent. The final question remains: Should the rod ever be used, and, if so, under what circumstances? When lack of training or poor training has produced delinquency in the boy and all other corrective measures have failed--as they usually will fail when applied too late--then corporal punishment, if not carried to the degree of brutality, may be attempted as a last resort before confinement in the reform school or house of detention. I have profound pity for the fathers who expend less gray matter in the training of their sons than they do in the training of their hunting dogs. Give each the same thoughtful, intelligent, patient training and the boy will surpass the dog in docility, obedience, and understanding. With better knowledge of the boy and his psychology, and with better trained parents, the necessity for the use of the rod has disappeared. “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Prov. 22:6. CHAPTER XI THE CIGARETTE HABIT