e only course left for the well-bred in such circumstances."

An hour later I saw her punish her child for denying that she had
committed some piece of mischief of which she was guilty. The mother's
excuse to herself probably was that the child told a lie, she, a
"society fib." Perhaps the smaller sinner had no reputation for
breeding to maintain.

The love for drink is not more surely transmitted from father to son
than is the habit of lying. Once begun in a family, it rears itself,
like a hooded snake, all along the line in generation after generation
and appears to be an ineradicable evil. It spreads, too, as specks in
a garnered fruit. We are startled by seeing it in children by the time
they can lisp a lie, and we note in them, with a sickening at heart,
the father's or grandfather's tendency to secretiveness or deceit, or
the mother's _penchant_ for false excuses. We can scarcely bequeath a
greater sorrow to our offspring than to curse them before their birth
with this hereditary taint, which is, perhaps, one of the hardest of
all evils to correct. It may take the form of exaggerated speech, of
courteous or cowardly prevarication, or of downright falsehood, but,
in whatever guise, it is a curse to the owner thereof as well as to
his family. If you are so unfortunate as to have any symptom of it in
your blood, watch your boy or girl from infancy, and try, by all the
arts in your power, fighting against nature itself, even, to prevent
what is bred in the bone from coming out in the flesh.

We children of a larger growth can do much toward the correction of
this blemish in others as in ourselves by close guard over our own
speeches and assertions.

There are no sharper, more intolerant critics than the little ones,
and if they inherit the tendency to insincerity the only way in which
you can avert the much-to-be dreaded sin is by being absolutely
truthful yourself. Cultivate veracity as a virtue, as a grace, as a
vital necessity for the integrity of the soul. Prune excrescences in
the shape of loose statements; if you err in telling a wonderful
story, let it be in cutting down rather than in magnifying. A couple
of ciphers less are better than one too many. It is to be feared that
for many of us this would be a hard, although a wholesome task. The
trail of the serpent is over us all. We yield heedlessly to the
temptation to break promises, and to the habit of giving false reasons
to our children, little thinking