In regard to truth—always such a difficulty in education,—I certainly had, as a child, and like most children, confused ideas about it. I had a more distinct and absolute idea of honour than of truth,—a mistake into which our conventional morality leads those who educate and those who are educated. I knew very well, in a general way, that to tell a lie was _wicked_; to lie for my own profit or pleasure, or to the hurt of others, was, according to my infant code of morals, worse than wicked—it was _dishonourable_. But I had no compunction about telling _fictions_;—inventing scenes and circumstances, which I related as real, and with a keen sense of triumphant enjoyment in seeing the listener taken in by a most artful and ingenious concatenation of impossibilities. In this respect “Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, that liar of the first magnitude,” was nothing in comparison to me. I must have been twelve years old before my conscience was first awakened up to a sense of the necessity of truth as a principle, as well as its holiness as a virtue. Afterwards, having to set right the minds of others cleared my own mind on this and some other important points. I do not think I was naturally obstinate, but remember going without food all day, and being sent hungry and exhausted to bed, because I would not do some trifling thing required of me. I think it was to recite some lines I knew by heart. I was punished as wilfully obstinate: but what no one knew then, and what I know now as the fact, was, that after refusing to do what was required, and bearing anger and threats in consequence, I lost the power to do it. I became stone: the _will_ was petrified, and I absolutely _could_ not comply. They might have hacked me in pieces before my lips could have unclosed to utterance. The obstinacy was not in the mind, but on the nerves; and I am persuaded that what we call obstinacy in children, and grownup people, too, is often something of this kind, and that it may be increased, by mismanagement, by persistence, or what is called firmness, in the controlling power, into disease, or something near to it.