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There were long, continuous writing-tables down the sides of the room, with backless benches, so arranged that when the pupil was writing his face was turned toward the wall there was a door at each end, and a box stove stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by a rectangle of four backless benches.
Just back of his seat upon the floor of the platform stood a row of dinner pails, and above on wooden pegs hung the children's hats and bonnets. On each side of the room was a long writing-desk, merely a rough board resting with the proper slant upon stout pins driven into the walls. Here on rude, backless benches sat the larger boys and girls.
Yesterday she had sat five hours on that backless bench with her chains in her lap, baited, badgered, persecuted by that unholy crew, without even the refreshment of a cup of water for she was never offered anything, and if I have made you know her by this time you will know without my telling you that she was not a person likely to ask favors of those people.
In front of the door of "The Palatial" was a garden-bed filled with weeds and flowers mixed up together like the good and evil in the heart of a man, and to the right-hand side of this bed stood an old and backless wooden chair.
Every possible shade of mental condition, from confident knowledge to foreboding bewilderment, would be expressed in their faces. The instant one of them had completed his work, he banged his slate down upon the backless chair, with the writing turned under. The others followed as best they could, and all the slates being down, they awaited the doctor's coming around to their class again.
Here is a description of the delights of a stage coach journey: "A stage journey from one part of the country to another was as comfortless as could well be imagined. The coach was without springs, and the seats were hard and often backless. The horses were jaded and worn, and the roads were rough with boulders and stumps of trees, or furrowed with ruts and quagmires.
Her looks made Ralph's spirits sink to forty below zero, and congeal. But on one of the backless little benches that sat in the middle of the school-room was little Shocky, who also cast many love glances at the young master; glances as grateful to his heart as Mirandy's ogling he was tempted to call it ogring was hateful. "Look at Shocky," giggled Betsey Short, behind her slate.
The terms of his indenture obligated the Squire to send him to school three months in the winter; and it was a delightful time to him when he took his seat on the backless benches of the old log school-house, with its one window, and that a long, low one, and its wide old fireplace. He learned to "read, write, and cypher" very fast.
A few backless forms were provided on the floor for unconvicted prisoners. We were accommodated with the front bench, and requested to sit two or three feet apart from each other, the few other prisoners occupying seats behind us being separated in the same way. The convicted prisoners sit in a railed-off part of the chapel, and I believe there is a gallery for the women.
Sponge to himself, as he heard Jog's reiterated assertion that he would be wheezing away that day. 'Wish you may get it, old boy, added he, tucking the now backless Mogg under his pillow, and turning over for a snooze.
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