longer must I stay in the field?"

"About an hour," was the reply.

An hour seemed a great while in the circumstances, and I ventured to say,
"I wish I could go home now--my head aches."

"I am very sorry," said my father; "but can't you stay till it is time to
go home to dinner?"

I thought not--my headache was getting to be pretty severe.

"Well," said he, taking me off the horse, and no doubt suspecting that my
disease was rather in my _heart_ than my head--a suspicion far too
well-founded, I am sorry to say--"well, you may go home. I don't want you
to work if you are sick. Go straight home, and tell your mother that I say
you must take a good large dose of rhubarb. Tell her that I think it will
do you a great deal of good!"

There was no alternative. I went home, of course, and delivered the message
to my mother. I told her, however, that I thought my head was better,
hoping to avoid taking the nauseous medicine. But it was of no use. It was
too late. She understood my case as well as my father did. She knew well
enough my disease was laziness. So she prepared the rhubarb--an unusually
generous dose, I always thought--and I had to swallow every morsel of it.
Dear me! how bitter it was! It makes me sick to think of a dose of rhubarb,
let me be ever so well. I am sure I would have rode horse all day--and all
night, too, for that matter--rather than to have been doctored after that
sort. But it cured my laziness pretty effectually, and it was a long time
before I told another lie, too.

"Honesty is the best policy," children, depend upon it, though there is
another and a better reason, as you very well know, why you should always
speak the truth.

STORY SECOND.
HOW A ROGUE FEELS WHEN HE IS CAUGHT.

When I was a little boy, as near as I can recollect, about nine years of
age, I went with my brother one bright Saturday afternoon, when there was
no school, to visit at the house of Captain Perry. The captain was esteemed
one of the kindest and best-natured neighbors in Willow Lane, where my
father lived; and Julian, the captain's eldest son, very near my own age,
was, among all the boys at school, my favorite play-fellow. Captain Perry
had two bee-hives in his garden, where we were all three at play; and as I
watched the busy little fellows at work bringing in honey from the fields,
all at once I thought it would be a very fine thing to thrust a stick into
a hol