She was taking her first lesson in civilization.

She was beginning to be wise; learning new accomplishments, and, alas!--to be systematically and judicially cruel! Nothing could have been more repugnant or foreign to the free Slav barbarian than the penal code which was modeled by Yaroslaf upon the one at Byzantium.

Corporal punishment was unknown to the Slav, and was abhorrent to his instincts.

This seems a strange statement to make regarding the land of the _knout_! But it is true.

And imprisonment, convict labor, flogging, torture, mutilation, and even the death penalty, came into this land by the way of Constantinople.
At the same time there mingled with this another stream from Scandinavia, another judicial code which sanctioned private revenge, the pursuit of an assassin by all the relatives of the dead; also the ordeal by red-hot iron and boiling water.