STORY FIRST. HONESTY THE BEST POLICY.

A person is, on the whole, a great deal better off to be honest.  Dishonesty is a losing game.  A wise man was once asked what one gained by not telling the truth.  The reply was, “Not to be believed when he speaks the truth.”  He was right.  There are a great many other respects, too, in which a dishonest person suffers by his dishonesty.  I must tell you what a lie once cost me.  I was about nine years old, perhaps.  In justice to myself, I ought to say that I was not much addicted to this vice; but told a fib once in a great while, as I am afraid too many other little boys, pretty good on the whole, sometimes allow themselves to do.  One very cool day in the spring of the year, my father, who was a farmer, was ploughing, and I was riding horse.  I didn’t relish the task very well, as I was rather cold, and old Silvertail was full of his mischief.  It was a little more than I could do to manage him.  Moreover, there was some rare sport going on at home.

“Father,” said I, after bearing the penance for the greater part of the forenoon, “how much 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.