ng it,
trusting it, defending it, in all sincerity, against all assailants. It
is not the lie they defend, but the truth in the lie. What a relief it
was when I first made that discovery! I was ready to think meanly of my
kind, to distrust humanity's instincts for truth. The lookout was on
despair. But, when I understood the nature of the lie, I learned to
think better of my brethren, I learned to have more hope in their Maker.
No, there is no building on nothing. Every lie has a substratum of
truth. In fact, look closer, and is not a lie only a distorted truth?--a
truth torn from its connections, its features twisted out of all
symmetry, its outlines battered out of all shape?

A man tells a true story to-day, in the hearing of one who has this
distorting power, an essentially untrue soul. He hears the same story
to-morrow, the very same, but so deformed, so mangled, so patched, that
it is, now, every inch a lie--the truth gone crazy. That is, a truth
half told is a lie, a truth added to is a lie, a truth distorted is a
lie, a truth with its due proportions changed is a lie. And a lie may
always be defined as a lame, deformed, or crazy truth.

And it is the truth in the lie that gives it its power, that makes
honest men so often accept, love, and help it. Their conscious design is
to work for the truth's sake. It is the truth in the lie that makes so
many logic shafts, so many rhetoric arrows glance off, as from the hide
of a rhinoceros.

And the bigger the lie the bigger also the truth. That is another bit of
science. If Mrs. Tattle tells Mrs. Tittle a lie about Mrs. Jenkins, she
knows very well Mrs. Tittle will not believe her unless her lie has some
spice of fact to go on, unless it has _vraisemblance_, truth-likeness,
an appearance of foundation at least. Mean little lies, like those she
sets going, do not need much salt of truth to keep them from spoiling;
still they require their due modicum, and they usually have it. As for
instance, she says, with a long face, to Mrs. Tittle: 'Mrs. Jenkins, the
widow Jenkins, you know, it's _awful_. She went over to Pinkins's last
evening; I saw her go, and I do believe she stayed till twelve, and Mrs.
Pinkins is away, you know. Isn't it terrible?' and she raises her eyes
in pious horror at the depravity of the world, and of handsome young
widows in particular. That is the _lie_. Now here is the _truth_. Mrs.
Jenkins _did_ go across the way to Pinkins's, because one of his li