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Updated: June 19, 2025
These places are strongly built, and well supplied with thumbscrews, gags, cowskins and other whips, oftentimes bloody. The disgrace of such scenes in the capital of our republic cannot be otherwise than painful to every patriotic mind; while they furnish materials for the most pungent satire to other nations.
He turns the thumbscrews on the public, raises prices, and if they complain, he says, 'What are you going to do about it? and if anybody says the public cannot stand it, they say 'the public be blessed, or the other thing. Now, wait. The public will be making laws, and the first law that is made will be one that sends a man to the penitentiary who robs through a trust.
"Now," said the sergeant, resting the cold muzzle of his weapon against the boy's forehead, "at the word three your brains are on the floor if you don't tell me where your people are hid one two " "Stop, sergeant, let him have a taste of the thumbscrews before you finish him off," suggested one of the men. "So be it fetch them." The horrible instrument of torture was brought.
It was a day of dungeons, whipping-posts, and thumbscrews, when slight offenders were maimed and bruised and great offenders cut into pieces by sentence of court.
What boys, then, owed money to these harpies as well as Ernest? Here, again, there was a feeble show of resistance, but the thumbscrews were instantly applied, and Ernest, demoralised as he already was, recanted and submitted himself to the powers that were. He told only a little less than he knew or thought he knew.
Antonoff endures the torture, but no agony can make him prove false to his friends. When his captors give him a respite from the thumbscrews and the red-hot wires that are thrust under his nails, he forgets his own torment, and scratches on his plate his cipher signals to his comrades.
I guessed that this was the governor's room, and we should be put through our first examination. My head was too stupid to think, and I made up my mind to keep perfectly mum. Yes, even if they tried thumbscrews. I had no kind of story, but I resolved not to give anything away. As I turned the handle I wondered idly what kind of sallow Turk or bulging-necked German we should find inside.
Many of the rooms in this building resemble the cells of a prison, and in a small apartment near the "office" are to be seen any number of iron collars, hobbles, handcuffs, thumbscrews, cowhides, chains, gags, and yokes. A back-yard, enclosed by a high wall, looks something like the playground attached to one of our large New England schools, in which are rows of benches and swings.
The fingers were tapered like a woman's. The nails were filbert-shaped, and grimy with recent climbing. The palms were hard. The knuckle-side was very brown, and showed the tendons prominently. They were those lean, nervous sort of hands which you find out at times can grip like thumbscrews. My couch was an uneasy one, and I awoke early.
Or probably had Darwin been persistent we would have consigned him to the stocks, burned his book in the public square, and with the aid of logical thumbscrews made him recant. Even as it was, the gibes and guffaws of the press and pulpit came near drowning the modest, moderate voice of Darwin; and for a score of years, his reputation as a scientist seemed to be trembling in the balance.
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