Accentuating the Negative

By Edmund Janko

The schoolmaster had the reputation of being a kindly man, but probably the accepted theory of what young boys were like and what worked in school was such that he believed that each of his students needed to "have their clock wound up every Monday," which, in practice, meant that every one of them needed a good flogging to start off the week as motivation that would last them until Friday. Luckily for the boys, the schoolmaster's wife was just as kind as her husband--and a lot more sensible--and she regularly "lost" the keys to the closet where the rods were kept. But the terror of Monday morning...