egards her future well-being. He
feared it would be necessary to send her to a deformatory.

"I have generally found," said the Mayor, gravely but kindly, "that the
fault in these distressing cases lies rather with the parent than the
children. Does the child never break anything by accident?"

"Yes," said the father.

"And you have duly punished her for it?"

"Alas! sir, I fear I only told her she was a naughty girl, and must not
do it again."

"Then how can you expect your child to learn those petty arts of
deception without which she must fall an easy prey to any one who wishes
to deceive her? How can she detect lying in other people unless she has
had some experience of it in her own practice? How, again, can she learn
when it will be well for her to lie, and when to refrain from doing so,
unless she has made many a mistake on a small scale while at an age when
mistakes do not greatly matter? The Sunchild (and here he reverently
raised his hat), as you may read in chapter thirty-one of his Sayings,
has left us a touching tale of a little boy, who, having cut down an
apple tree in his father's garden, lamented his inability to tell a lie.
Some commentators, indeed, have held that the evidence was so strongly
against the boy that no lie would have been of any use to him, and that
his perception of this fact was all that he intended to convey; but the
best authorities take his simple words, 'I cannot tell a lie,' in their
most natural sense, as being his expression of regret at the way in which
his education had been neglected. If that case had come before me, I
should have punished the boy's father, unless he could show that the best
authorities are mistaken (as indeed they too generally are), and that
under more favourable circumstances the boy would have been able to lie,
and would have lied accordingly.

"There is no occasion for you to send your child to a deformatory. I am
always averse to extreme measures when I can avoid them. Moreover, in a
deformatory she would be almost certain to fall in with characters as
intractable as her own. Take her home and whip her next time she so much
as pulls about the salt. If you will do this whenever you get a chance,
I have every hope that you will have no occasion to come to me again."

"Very well, sir," said the father, "I will do my best, but the child is
so instinctively truthful that I am afraid whipping will be of little
use."

There were other cases,