There is much even yet to be done in clearing up the _modus operandi_ of children’s lies. How quick, for example, is a child to find out the simple good-natured people, as the servant-maid, or gardener, who will listen to his romancing and flatter him by appearing to accept it all as gospel. More significant is the fact that intentional deception is apt to show itself towards certain people only. There is many a school-boy who would think it no dishonour to say what is untrue to those he dislikes, especially by way of getting them into hot water, though he would feel it mean and base to lie to his mother or his father, and bad form to lie to the head-master. Similar distinctions show themselves in earlier stages, and are another point of similarity between the child and the savage whose ideas of truthfulness seem to be truthfulness for _my_ people only. This is a side of the subject which would repay fuller inquiry. Another aspect of the subject which has been but little investigated is the influence of habit in the domain of lying, and the formation of persistent permanent lies. The impulse to stick to an untruth when once uttered is very human, and in the case of the child is enforced by the fear of discovery. This applies not only to falsehoods foisted on persons in authority, but to those by which clever boys and girls take pleasure in befooling the inferior wits of others. In this way there grow up in the nursery and in the playground traditional myths and legends which are solemnly believed by the simple-minded. Such invention is in part the outcome of the “pleasures of the imagination”. Yet it is probable that these are in all cases reinforced not only by the wish to produce an effect, but by the love of power which in the child not endowed with physical prowess is apt to show itself in hood-winking and practical joking. Closely connected with the permanence of untruths is the contagiousness of lying. The propagation of falsehood is apt to be promoted by a certain tremulous admiration for the hardihood of the lie and by the impulses of the rebel which never quite slumber even in the case of fairly obedient children. I suspect, however, that it is in all cases largely due to the force of suggestion. The falsehood boldly announced is apt to captivate the mind and hold it under a kind of spell. This effect of suggestion in generating falsehood is very marked in those pathological or semi-pathological cases where children have been led to give false testimony. It is now known that it is quite possible to provoke an illusion of memory in certain children between the ages of six and fifteen by simply affirming something in their hearing, whether they are in the waking or in the sleeping state, so that they are ready to state that they actually saw happen what was asserted.[186] ----- Footnote 186: