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That is, the 'martinet' worse than the 'knout de Russe'; the 'poucettes', the 'crapaudine' on neck and ankles and wrists; all, all as bad as the 'Pater Noster' of the Inquisition, as Mayer said the other day in the face of Charpentier, the Commandant of the penitentiary. How pleasant also to think of the Boulevard de Guillotine! I tell you it is brutal, horrible.
Petersburg; her Vicars of Wakefield will abound in the genial humor of devils and dragons, saints and tortures; and the wit of her Sidney Smiths will have a crack of the knout about it, skinning men's back's rather than their backslidings; effective only when it draws human blood, and best approved by the censors when it strikes at human freedom.
Two more Russians are speared to death under Pushkareff's eyes, two wounded, and the Cossack himself, with his fourteen men, forced to beat a hasty retreat back to ships and huts on the coast. Here, strange enough, things have gone wrong, too! More women and children objecting to their masters' pleasure slavery, the knout, the branding iron, death by starvation and abuse.
Talk of knouting indeed! which we did at the beginning of this paper in the mere playfulness of our hearts and which the great master of the knout, Christopher, who visited men's trespasses like the Eumenides, never resorted to but in love for some great idea which had been outraged; why, this man knouted his way through life, from bloody youth up to truculent old age.
It was just the same before the railway opened up Siberia and revealed prosperous cities, fertile plains, and boundless mineral resources to an astonished world. A decade ago my return from this land of civilization, progress, and, above all, humanity was invariably met by the kind of question that heads this chapter, with the addition, as a rule, of facetious allusions to torture and the knout!
"Never!" said Ivan, swallowing another glass of brandy, "never will Ivan want for money as long as there is a kopeck in my lady's purse." "I did not find her so liberal," said Gregory bitterly. "Oh, you forget, my friend; you know well she does not reckon with her friends: remember the strokes of the knout." "I have no wish to speak about that," said Gregory.
On the one hand, Guerrero, Bustamente, Santa Anna; on the other, a race of men to whom, if one wished them their deserts, one could desire nothing better than an Austrian schlague or a Russian knout, to make them sensible of the value of that liberty which they do not know how to appreciate.
The frightened ministers hastened to dismiss these officers, but this did not satisfy the savage soldiery, who insisted on their being delivered into their hands. This done, the unfortunate officers were sentenced to be scourged, some of them by that fearful Russian whip called the knout. Their success in this outbreak led the Strelitz to greater outrages.
But the poor, miserable wretches were unmercifully flogged on their bare backs with that terrible weapon of torture, the knout; and while some of them sent up piteous cries as the cruel whip tore their flesh, others received their punishment in stolid silence, as though disdaining to let the tyrants know that they suffered, while still others paid back every lash with a curse.
I will soon prove it to you." As he said the last words, Colston let go Arnold's shoulders, flung off his coat and waistcoat, slipped his braces off his shoulders, and pulled his shirt up to his neck. Then he turned his bare back to his guest, and said "That is the sign-manual of Russian tyranny the mark of the knout!" Arnold shrank back with a cry of horror at the sight.
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