Sometimes these justifications are pitiful examples of quibbling. A boy had been rough with his baby brother. His mother chid him, telling him he might hurt baby. He then asked his mother, ‘Isn’t he my own brother?’ and on his mother admitting so incontestable a proposition, exclaimed triumphantly, “Well, you said I could do what I liked with _my own_ things”. The idea of the precious baby being a boy’s own to do what he likes with is so remote from older people’s conceptions that it seems impossible to credit the boy with misunderstanding. We ought, perhaps, to set him down as a depraved little sophist and destined—but predictions happily lie outside our _métier_. In some cases these justifications have a dreadful look of being after-thoughts invented for the express purpose of self-protection and knowingly put forward as fibs. Yet there is need of a wise discrimination here. Take, for example, the following from the Worcester Collection. A boy of three was told by his mother to stay and mind his baby-sister while she went downstairs. On going up again some time after she met him on the stairs. “Being asked why he had left the baby he said there was a bumble-bee in the room and he was afraid he would get stung if he stayed there. His mother asked him if he wasn’t afraid his little sister would get stung. He said, ‘Yes,’ but added that if he stayed in the room the bee might sting them both, and then she would have two to take care of.” Now with every wish to be charitable I cannot bring myself to think that the small boy had really gone through that subtle process of disinterested calculation before vacating the room in favour of the bumble-bee, if indeed there was a bumble-bee. To be caught in the act and questioned is, I suspect, a situation particularly productive of such specious fibbing. One other illustration of this keen childish dialectic when face to face with the accuser deserves to be touched on. The sharp little wits have something of a lawyer’s quickness in detecting a flaw in the indictment. Any exaggeration into which a feeling of indignation happens to betray the accuser is instantly pounced upon. If, for example, a child is scolded for pulling kitty’s ears and making her cry it is enough for the little stickler for accuracy to be able to say: ‘I wasn’t pulling kitty’s _ears_, I was only pulling _one_ of her ears’. This ability to deny the charge in its initial form gives the child a great advantage, and robs the accusation in its amended form of much of its sting. Whence, by the way, one may infer that wisdom in managing children shows itself in nothing more than in a scrupulous exactness in the use of words.