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Two actual instruments of torture are mentioned, one for compressing the ankle-bones, and the other for squeezing the fingers, to be used if necessary to extort a confession in charges of robbery and homicide, confession being regarded as essential to the completion of the record.
The fibula, or outer bone of the leg, had been snapped at its lower end just above the ankle, the foot had been dislocated to one side, and either the inner ligament of the ankle had given way, or what would be more serious one of the ankle-bones itself had been torn.
You would see her standing erect with her ankle-bones together and her foil arched over her head, the hilt in one hand and the button in the other the old general opposite, bent forward, left hand reposing on his back, his foil advanced, slightly wiggling and squirming, his watching eye boring straight into hers and all of a sudden she would give a spring forward, and back again; and there she was, with the foil arched over her head as before.
Every text-book on China devotes a special chapter to the subject of punishment. Mutilation is extremely common. Often I met men who had been deprived of their ears they had lost them, they explained, in battle facing the enemy! It is a common punishment to sever the hamstrings or to break the ankle-bones, especially in the case of prisoners who have attempted to escape.
When he got his lubberly sandals on, and his long robe of coarse brown linen cloth, which hung straight from his neck to his ankle-bones, he was no longer the comeliest man in his kingdom, but one of the unhandsomest and most commonplace and unattractive.
I confess unto thee, by the blessed ankle-bones of Saint Denis, that I never could make out why. I never saw in him anything to love; and had I so done, methinks he had soon had that folly out of me. At first I scarcely understood all.
One hundred thousand francs for a throat, one hundred thousand francs for a couple of ankle-bones, those are the two financial scourges of the Opera." "I am amazed," said Gazonal, "at the hundreds of thousands of francs walking about here." "We'll amaze you a good deal more, my dear cousin," said Leon de Lora.
There was no light, and the house was wrapped in silence. Earlier there had been everywhere sentries, and, not daring to breathe, I waited for one of them to challenge, but, except for the creaking of the stairs and of my ankle-bones, which seemed to explode like firecrackers, there was not a sound.
A pair of North-American trousers accompanied it, turned up to show the ankle-bones of a rich pair of stockings; neat, enthusiastic and humorous, I judged them to be; for, as one may discover, my only amusement during my martyrdom if this misery can be said to possess such alleviatings had been the study of feet, pantaloons, and skirts. The trousers in this case detained my observation no time.
Not many days after Baldy's accident in furling sails in this same frenzied manner, under the stimulus of a shouting officer a seaman fell from the main-royal-yard of an English line-of-battle ship near us, and buried his ankle-bones in the deck, leaving two indentations there, as if scooped out by a carpenter's gouge.
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