In this case, I suspect, there was co-operant a strongly marked childish characteristic, the love of producing an effect. A child has a large measure of that feeling which R. L. Stevenson attributes to the light-hearted Innes in _Weir of Hermiston_, "the mere pleasure of beholding interested faces". The well-known "cock and bull" stories of small children are inspired by this love of strong effect. It is the dramatic impulse of childhood endeavouring to bring life into the dulness of the serious hours. Childish vanity often assists, as where a little girl of five would go about scattering the most alarming kind of false news, as, for example, that baby was dead, simply to court attention and make herself of some importance. A quick vivid fancy, a childish passion for acting a part, these, backed by a strong impulse to astonish, and a playful turn for contradiction and paradox, seem to me to account for most of this early fibbing and other similar varieties of early misstatement. Naughty it is, no doubt, in a measure; but is it quite fairly branded as lying, that is, as a serious attempt to deceive? In some cases, I think, the vivid play of imagination which prompts the untrue assertion may lead to a measure of self-deception. When, for example, an Italian child, of whom Signorina Lombroso tells us, who is out for a walk, and wanting to be carried says, "My leg hurts me and my foot too just here, I can't walk, I can't, I can't," it is possible at least that the vivid imagination of the South produces at the moment an illusory sense of fatigue. And if so we must hesitate to call the statement wholly a falsehood. A fertile source of childish "untruth," which may be more true than untrue in the sense of expressing the conviction of the moment, is the wish to please. An emotional child who in a sudden fit of tenderness for his mother gushes out, "You're the best mother in the whole world!" may be hardly conscious of any exaggeration. There is more of artfulness in the flatteries which appear to involve a calculating intention to say the nice agreeable thing. Some children, especially little girls, are, I believe, adepts at these amenities. Those in whom the impulse is strong and dominant are perhaps those who in later years make the good society actors. Yet if there is a measure of untruth in such pretty flatteries, one needs to be superhuman in order to condemn them harshly.