This suggestion often combines with other forces. Here is a good example. A little American girl, sent into the oak shrubbery to get a leaf, saw a snake, which so frightened her that she ran home without the leaf. As cruel fate would have it she met her brothers and told them she had seen a ‘’sauger’. “They knew (writes the lady who recalls this reminiscence of her childhood) the difference between snakes and their habits, and, boy-like, wanted to tease me, and said ‘’Twas no ’sauger—it didn’t have a red ring round its neck, now, did it?’ My heated imagination saw just such a serpent as soon as their words were spoken, and I declared it had a ring about ‘its neck’.” In this way she was led on to say that it had scars and a little bell on its neck, and was soundly rated by her brothers as a ‘liar’.[183] Here we have a case of “illusion of memory” induced by suggestion acting on a mind made preternaturally sensitive by the fear from which it had not yet recovered. If there was a germ of mendacity in the case it had its source in the shrinking from the brothers’ ridicule, the wish not to seem utterly ignorant about these boyish matters, the snakes. Yet who would say that such swift unseizable movements of feeling in the dim background of consciousness made the child’s responses lies in the proper sense of the word? ----- Footnote 183: Sara E. Wiltshire, _The Christian Union_, vol. xl., No. 26. ----- It seems paradoxical, yet is, I believe, indisputable, that a large part of childish untruth comes upon the scene in connexion with moral authority and discipline. We shall see by-and-by that unregenerate child-nature is very apt to take up the attitude of self-defence towards those who administer law and inflict punishment. Very little children brought face to face with restraint and punishment will ‘try on’ these ruses. Here are one or two illustrations from the notes on the little girl M. When seventeen and a half months old she threw down her gloves when wheeled in her mail-cart by her mother. The latter picked them up and told her not to throw them away again. She was at first good, then seemed to deliberate and finally called out: ‘Mamma, Bubbo’ (dog). The mother turned to look, and the little imp threw her gloves away again, laughing; there was of course no dog. The fib about the dog formed part of a piece of childish make-believe, of an infantile comedy. It was hardly more when about two months later, after she had thrown down and broken her tea-things, and her mother had come up to her, she said: ‘Mamma broke tea-things—beat mamma,’ and proceeded to beat her. In connexion with such little child-comedies there can be no talk of deception. They are the outcome of the childish instinct to upset the serious attitude of authority by a bit of fun.