THREE:"When we went into the court-room, a man had just been sentenced to receive twenty blows of the bamboo, and the sentence was immediately carried out. He was ordered to lie down with his face to the floor; his back was then stripped, and while his legs and arms were held by attendants, the executioner laid on the twenty blows with a bamboo stick about six[Pg 370] feet long and two inches wide. One side of the stick was rounded and the other was flat; the flesh was blistered at every stroke, or raised in a great puff, and it is certain that the man must be some time in getting well. He did not scream or make the least outcry, but took his punishment patiently, and was raised to his feet at its end. He bowed to the judge, and, perhaps, thanked him for the attention he had received, and was then led away to make room for some one else.Alice looked almost shocked at the notion of such unhallowed feet being thrust into these hardly less than sacred embroideries: it was as if her mother had suggested making a skirt out of the parrots and pomegranates that adorned the ��smart�� altar-cloth. But she divined that, in spite of her father��s inexplicable want of reverence for the Master (they had become Master and Helper, and sometimes she called him ��sir,�� much as Norah had called her father, but for antipodal reasons), there lurked behind his rather unseemly jokes a kindly intention towards herself. He might laugh at her, but somehow below that she felt (and she knew not how) that a part of him understood, and did not laugh. It was as if he knew what it meant to be in love, to thirst and to be unslaked, to be hungry and not to be fed.