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 that their grave, innocent eyes may read our souls more clearly than those of older persons who are not so easily deceived by our tongues.  When your child, although a mere baby in years, once discovers in you exaggeration or untruthfulness, he remembers it always, and you, from that moment, lose one of the most precious joys and sacred opportunities of your life—­that of inspiring his entire confidence and trust, and of leading the tiny feet in the seldom-trodden path of Perfect Truth.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE GOSPEL OF CONVENTIONALITIES.

Young people are proverbially intolerant, so I listened patiently, a few days since, to the outburst of an impetuous girl-friend.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, “we are all such shams!”

“Shams?” I repeated, interrogatively.