ONCE I remember having been led into telling a lie, through a servant girl, for whose benefit it was told. Suspicion instantly arose from my dreadful embarrassment of manner. A strict investigation commenced; the girl told me to face it out, for nobody else knew of it and she would not flinch. But my terrors of conscience were insupportable. I could not bear my father’s steady eye fixed on mine, still less the anxious wondering expression of my brother’s innocent face, who could not believe me guilty. I confessed at once; and with a heavy sigh my father sent to borrow from a neighbor an instrument of chastisement never before needed in his own home.
He took me to another room and said, “Child, it will pain me more to punish you thus, than any blows I can inflict will pain you; but I must do it; you have told a lie—a dreadful sin, and a mean, base, cowardly action. If I let you grow up a liar, you will reproach me for it one day. If I now spare the rod, I should hate the child.”
I took the punishment in a most extraordinary spirit. I wished every stroke had been a stab; I wept because the pain was not great enough and I loved my father at that moment better than I had ever loved him before.
I thanked him, and I thank him still; for I never transgressed in that way again. The servant was called, received her wages and a most awful lecture, and was discharged the same hour.
ML 01/18/1903