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Updated: June 22, 2025
Earle for several weeks; and, despite herself, when the worst fears oppressed her, her first impulse was to turn to him. It had always seemed so easy for him to do what he liked! Perhaps he was growing anxious to know if he could give the thumb-screw another turn. At all events, he directed his steps toward Mr. Hastings' house on the afternoon of the last day in August. Mrs.
The fourth division consisted of the thumb-screw, speculum oris, and chains and shackles of different kinds, collected at Liverpool. To these were added, iron neck-collars, and other instruments of punishment and confinement used in the West Indies, and collected at other places.
While in this state, tortures and the fagot are powerless to extort groans or confessions from the racked or half-consumed martyr. Many a sufferer has borne the agony of the boots or the thumb-screw without flinching, whose courage has given way under the less painful but more unendurable punishment of prolonged imprisonment.
To cap the climax of vexation, these persons will very probably come in, after not many days, and propose to cash their notes at double interest off. Only an official of the Inquisition could turn the thumb-screw so many times, and so remorselessly. But we have yet to consider the collection of debts.
He had a sudden desire to rend this philosophic Catholic to put him under the thumb-screw for the glory of the Lord, and to justify the Church; but the little Catholic miller-magnate gave freely to St. Saviour's; he was popular; he had a position; he was good to the poor; and every Christmas-time he sent a half-dozen bags of flour to the presbytery!
Torture is unknown to English law; but, in our day of the "third degree," nobody needs to be told that what is put out at the door may steal in at the window. It may be that, in the seventeenth century, the pious English justices had no suspicion that enforced sleeplessness is a form of physical torture more nerve-racking and irresistible than the thumb-screw.
There are always men who wish to compel such characters to submit, by the pressure of circumstances. This kind of spiritual thumb-screw was often, and in various ways, tried upon Friend Hopper; but though it sometimes occasioned temporary inconvenience, it never induced him to change his course.
It was the practice of our venerable ancestors to apply that ingenious instrument the thumb-screw, and to tighten and tighten it in order to elicit non-existent facts; they had a fixed opinion to begin with, that the facts were existent, and what had they to do but to tighten the thumb-screw? In like manner, Mr.
Out fly my best thoughts, my finest figures, my sharpest epigrams, without chloroform, and I give no sign. I have heard that successful authors can always have everything their own way. I must be the greatest or the smallest failure of the age. "It will be much better to omit this," says the High Inquisitor, turning the thumb-screw. "No," I writhe. "Take everything else, but leave that."
Did the cows yield no milk? Some neighbour, doubtless, knew the reason only too well, and could be forced to confess it by liberal use of the thumb-screw and the ducking-stool.
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