not care to go home for a holiday: and indeed, by insubordination and
boisterousness; by playing tricks and breaking windows; by marauding upon
the gardener's peaches and the housekeeper's jam; by upsetting his two
little brothers in a go-cart (of which wanton and careless injury the
present Baronet's nose bears marks to this very day); by going to sleep
during the sermons, and treating reverend gentlemen with levity, he drew
down on himself the merited wrath of his stepmother; and many punishments
in this present life, besides those of a future and much more durable
kind, which the good lady did not fail to point out that he must
undoubtedly inherit. His father, at Mrs. Newcome's instigation, certainly
whipped Tommy for upsetting his little brothers in the go-cart; but upon
being pressed to repeat the whipping for some other peccadillo performed
soon after, Mr. Newcome refused at once, using a wicked, worldly
expression, which well might shock any serious lady; saying, in fact,
that he would be deed if he beat the boy any more, and that he got
flogging enough at school, in which opinion Master Tommy fully coincided.

The undaunted woman, his stepmother, was not to be made to forgo her
plans for the boy's reform by any such vulgar ribaldries; and Mr. Newcome
being absent in the City on his business, and Tommy refractory as usual,
she summoned the serious butler and the black footman (for the lashings
of whose brethren she felt an unaffected pity) to operate together in the
chastisement of this young criminal. But he dashed so furiously against
the butler's shins as to draw blood from his comely limbs, and to cause
that serious and overfed menial to limp and suffer for many days after;
and, seizing the decanter, he swore he would demolish blacky's ugly face
with it: nay, he threatened to discharge it at Mrs. Newcome's own head
before he would submit to the coercion which she desired her agents to
administer.