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It is certain that the appearance and disappearance of this mysterious father have given rise to very singular conjectures; and probably if the thumb-screws were put upon the organist, who was, they say, entrusted with the education of the interesting bastard, we might get the secret of his birth and possibly other unexpected revelations.
You can't do this thing without giving your father the warning that you would give your bitterest enemy you simply can't, and still be the man I have known and l liked for two whole years!" "Father's going to Wartrace this afternoon is merely an added twist of the thumb-screws," he protested in fresh wretchedness. "I should have gone to him first I meant to go to him first.
Thumb-screws and all, this appeared to be only a very elaborate "persuader," for use upon those who must be made to talk. But the doctor was thinking hard. A big light flashed into his eyes. "This," he declared, positively, "is something that will become a matter of course in our own educational system, as soon as the science of phrenology is better understood."
A dark crimson curtain, which covered a sort of niche, or Gothic recess in the wall, rose at the signal, and displayed the public executioner, a tall, grim, and hideous man, having an oaken table before him, on which lay thumb-screws, and an iron case, called the Scottish boot, used in those tyrannical days to torture accused persons.
Abraham seems also to have been sadly deficient in all the auxiliaries of family government, such as stocks, hand cuffs, foot-chains, yokes, gags, and thumb-screws. His destitution of these patriarchal indispensables is the more afflicting, when we consider his faithful discharge of responsibilities to his household, though so deplorably destitute of the needful aids.
Such religious liberty as they enjoyed in England, they meant to possess in England's colonies; and when Connecticut, in 1702, again put on the thumb-screws of persecution, these dissenters at once sent a protest across the seas.
He knew why he had not gone, but he had not confided the reason even to Nino, who was told most things. He had, moreover, been tolerably sure that nothing short of thumb-screws would extract any information from Paoluccio or his wife, for he knew his own people.
These things make a great difference to a sailor. The gale was now at its height, "blowing like scissors and thumb-screws"; the captain was on deck; the ship, which was light, rolling and pitching as tho she would shake the long sticks out of her, and the sails were gaping open and splitting in every direction.
Oldbuck next exhibited thumb-screws, which had given the Covenanters of former days the cramp in their joints, and a collar with the name of a fellow convicted of theft, whose services, as the inscription bore, had been adjudged to a neighbouring baron, in lieu of the modern Scottish punishment, which, as Oldbuck said, sends such culprits to enrich England by their labour, and themselves by their dexterity.
One contemplates the thing in its most unlovely aspects in the form of Simeon Stylites upon his pillar, devoured by worms, or of Bernard Gui, with his racks and his thumb-screws and his "secular arm" and it seems the very culmination of all human madness and horror.
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