is told in his autobiography. He tells how just an hour before
dinner a neighboring farmer had asked him to go to his field to
shake down the fruit from two apple trees. William was so glad to do
something for which he would receive pay that he allowed the work to
trench upon his dinner-time. The two large pumpkins he brought were
his pay, and he knew that they meant a great deal to his needy
family. Stillman, in writing of the incident, continues: "It is more
than sixty years since that punishment fell on my shoulders, but the
astonishment with which I received the flogging, instead of the
thanks which I anticipated for the wages I was bringing her, the
haste with which any mother administered it lest my father should
anticipate her and beat me after his own fashion, are as vivid in my
recollection as if it had taken place yesterday."

While I hope that not many of us are guilty of such flagrant abuse
of our power as is described above, still I am certain that on many
occasions we punish just as hastily, without giving a chance for
explanation and with as little thought as to whether "the punishment
fits the crime."

I have often been impressed by the great interest that mothers take
in uses of punishment and in kinds of punishment. It has sometimes
seemed as if the most valuable thing which they could carry away
with them from some child-study meeting was a new kind of punishment
for some very common offence. I have frequently felt as if the only
contact some mothers have with their children is to punish them, and
that punishment constituted the chief part of the poor children's
training.

Now, punishment undoubtedly has a place in the training of children,