ONE:"One of the interesting places we have visited is the office of the Board of Punishments, which corresponds pretty nearly to our courts of justice. But one great point of difference between their mode of administering justice and ours is that they employ torture, while we do not. Not only is the prisoner tortured after condemnation, but he is tortured before trial, in order to make him tell the truth; and even the witnesses, under certain circumstances, are submitted to the same treatment. We saw some of the instruments that they use, and there was not the least attempt to keep us from seeing them. It is customary to have them piled or hung up at the doors of the courts, so that culprits may know what to expect, and honest persons may be deterred from wickedness through fear. It is the same principle that is followed by some of the school-teachers in America when they hang up in full view the stick with which they intend to punish unruly boys.CHAPTER XV.
ONE:
ONE:Father, she said, and then she ran to him, stumbling over her dress, and put her hands on his shoulders.Life on a steamship at sea has many peculiarities. The ship is a world in itself, and its boundaries are narrow. You see the same faces day after day, and on a great ocean like the Pacific there is little to attract the attention outside of the vessel that carries you. You have sea and sky to look upon to-day as you looked upon them yesterday, and will look on them to-morrow. The sky may be clear or cloudy; fogs may envelop you; storms may arise, or a calm may spread over the waters; the great ship goes steadily on and on. The pulsations of the engine seem like those of the human heart; and when you wake at night, your first endeavor, as you collect your thoughts, is to listen for that ceaseless throbbing. One[Pg 53] falls into a monotonous way of life, and the days run on one after another, till you find it difficult to distinguish them apart. The hours for meals are the principal hours of the day, and with many persons the table is the place of greatest importance. They wander from deck to saloon, and from saloon to deck again, and hardly has the table been cleared after one meal, before they are thinking what they will have for the next. The managers of our great ocean lines have noted this peculiarity of human nature; some of them give no less than five meals a day, and if a passenger should wish to eat something between times, he could be accommodated.
