Page:Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz (1862).djvu/132

 to get intoxicated, and that God would punish him if he were willing to overlook my fault and forgive me. It was, therefore, necessary, as an example to the rest, that I should be duly punished.

He immediately, thereupon, sent for the steward, with whom I had unfortunately quarrelled about a week before, and ordered him to give me fifty good stripes with a leather whip. I kissed his feet and begged him to excuse me, or diminish the number of stripes. The steward might have interceded for me, but he aggravated my lord the resident’s anger still more by saying, that, if such young sweet-tooths were to be borne with, they would do it still more. However, the secretary entreated, and obtained, that only forty stripes should be given me. My companions were obliged, in my lord’s presence, to prepare and hoist me up, and the steward gave me the forty stripes with interest, and took his revenge upon me. After this I streamed with blood, and was compelled to keep my bed for about a fortnight, on learning which, afterwards, my lord the ambassador was sorry that I had had so much pain, and told the rest that it might have been stopped at twenty stripes. That wine, in consequence, so stuck in my throat that all those years I used wine very sparingly, and immediately afterwards would not drink it at all, though I gladly received Turkish sherbet.

Once, in order to visit some islands in the neighbourhood of Constantinople, my lord the legatus took a boat and made an excursion down the straits to the sea, which the Turks call Karadengis, or Kara Denysy, i. e. Black Sea. This gulf, called Pontus, is let by a narrow neck or not very broad passage into the Thracian Bos-