In my youth I was spanked freely and frequently for doing many
different things that were forbidden, and also for doing the same
thing many different times and getting caught doing it. That, of
course, was before the Boy Scout movement had come along to show
how easily and how sanely a boy's natural restlessness and a boy's
natural love for adventure may be directed into helpful channels;
that was when nearly everything a normal, active boy craved to do
was wrong and, therefore, held to be a spankable offense.

This was a general rule in our town. It did not especially apply
to any particular household, but it applied practically to all the
households with which I was in any way familiar. It was a community
where an old-fashioned brand of applied theology was most strictly
applied. Heaven was a place which went unanimously Democratic every
fall, because all the Republicans had gone elsewhere. Hell was a
place full of red-hot coals and clinkered sinners and unbaptized
babies and a smell like somebody cooking ham, with a deputy devil
coming in of a morning with an asbestos napkin draped over his arm
and flicking a fireproof cockroach off the table cloth and leaning
across the back of Satan's chair and saying: "Good mornin', boss.
How're you going to have your lost souls this mornin'--fried on
one side or turned over?" Sunday was three weeks long, and longer
than that if it rained. About all a fellow could do after he'd
come back from Sunday school was to sit round with his feet cramped
into the shoes and stockings which he never wore on week days and
with the rest of him incased in starchy, uncomfortable dress-up
clothes--just sit round and sit round and itch. You couldn't
scratch hard either. It was sinful to scratch audibly and with
good, broad, free strokes, which is the only satisfactory way to