When Pepin leaves home to seek his fortune things go badly wrong almost immediately. Within a few hours he has received the spanking of his life from an angry innkeeper's wife--and has lost his breeches into the bargain. His sole wish thereafter is to retrieve them. The Lost Breeches follows his unhappy odyssey as he pursues the missing garment, a journey all too frequently interspersed with the use of the Rod upon Pepin's person by the lady he has most recently annoyed: and there is no shortage of these. A delightful fairy-tale illustrated by Curtus with 33 original woodcuts.

An excerpt from the book:

We may suppose that to achieve the current state of affairs had taken little more than five seconds, from first pinch of ear-lobe to the appalling moment Pepin first realised that her fingers were groping in the region of his breeches ../buttons. There was a noise very like a snarl of impatienc, a sound to chill the blood ;a huge pressure on his abdomen, and the next moment Pepin's waist-band had been snapped clean through by main force, and the homely green woollen breeches had been snatched from his body like laundry torn from the line by a sudden tempest of wind. Seven seconds. A furious hand thrust his shirt-tail halfway up his back. Eight seconds. His wrists were seized, crushed and held. Precisely on cue, timed to a hair, the tenth second of this encounter was saluted by the first of what subsequently turned out to be several dozen ferocious applications of the innkeeper's wife's palm that, in due course, were to reduce all feeling within Pepin's rear end to an inchoate soup of sensations, all of them disagreeable in the extreme.

The last time Pepin had been spanked--as opposed to whipped--he had been four years old, and he had all but forgotten the experience. It now came back with a rush. The head aswim from prolonged inversion, the feeling of utter powerlessness and humiliation, the dagger-thrust of shame consequential upon the realisation of his semi-nudity, cruelly twisted in the belly of his self-esteem by the further sharp realisation that witnesses were present, the majority females not much older than he--and let us by no means overlook the intolerable yet continuing, nay mounting, pain in his hindquarters-all these worked upon him to such effect that in only a very short time he did as he had done on the earlier occasion; he burst into noisy tears and begged his tormentrix to cease.

The innkeeper's wife did not cease. She continued as she had begun, in no way put out of countenance by Pepin's loud distress, or the remarkably vivid shade of scarlet his bottom had already attained under her ministrations. Nor did the public nature of the proceeding discommode her (though we fear as much cannot be said for Pepin). She smacked on remorselessly; raw, clapping percussions that stung the ears. Her breasts heaving, dark eyes flashing, red lips slightly parted and her white teeth bared with effort, the innkeeper's wife put every ounce of her formidable musculature into the punishment, not needing to vary her aim more than a fraction this way or that in order to achieve near-total coverage: for, spread to its full length and span, her palm was nearly the size of poor Pepin's "moon"--now glowing a baleful, sanguine red as it sank into a Stygian night of degradation.