Crossword-Solution: BACKBOARDS 10 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 21

The average child of to-day would rebel most vigorously against such contrivances, and justly; for in a few American schools, as in English institutions, young ladies were literally tortured through sitting in stocks, being strapped to backboards, and wearing stiffened coats and stays re-inforced with strips of wood and metal.

The wisdom of such a proceeding is much upon a par with that which devoted the feet to stocks and the shoulders to backboards, in order to make them elegant, and denied them heaven's air and active exercise through care for their health.

Her boats, with their white enamel inside and out, their black gunwales with the narrow golden ribbon running round inside, the well-scrubbed masts, oars, thwarts, bottom-boards, and gratings, the brass lettered backboards, and cushioned sternsheets, were the pride of her midshipmen and the envy of nearly all the other young gentlemen in the squadron.

Singing, and other suitable exercises in which both arms are used equally, will improve the figure more than all the backboards in the world.

This last they were ever shifting in position, although the favourite mode of carrying it seemed to be across the shoulders, something like the way young ladies at properly conducted schools are made to shoulder their backboards, with their hands hanging over the stock and barrel.