"Not only let your utterance be simple truth, as you apprehend it, but let it be decisive and unambiguous, according to those apprehensions. Some persons speak as falteringly as if they thought the text I have cited ran, 'Let your yea be nay, and your nay, yea.' And so they are apt to assent or dissent, according to the tenor of the last argument: 'Yes--no--yes--no.' It is just like listening to the pendulum of a clock. "It is a great aggravation of the misuse of 'yes' and 'no,' that the young are apt to lose all true apprehension of their meaning, and think, in certain cases, that 'yes' cannot mean 'yes,' nor 'no' 'no.' "I have known a lad, whose mother's 'no' had generally ended in 'yes,' completely ruined, because when his father said 'no' in reply to a request for unreasonable aid, and threatened to leave him to his own devices if he persisted in extravagance, could not believe that his father meant what he said, or could prevail on justice to turn nature out of doors. But his father meant 'no,' and stuck to it, and the lad was ruined, simply because, you see, he had not noticed that father and mother differed in their dialects--that his father's 'no' always meant 'no,' and nothing else. You have read 'Rob Roy,' and may recollect that that amiable young gentleman, Mr. F. Osbaldistone, with less reason, very nearly made an equally fatal mistake; for every word his father had ever uttered, and every muscle in his face, every gesture, every step, ought to have convinced him that his father always meant what he said. "In fine, learn to apply these little words aright and honestly, and, little though they be, you will keep the love of truth pure and unsullied. "Ah me! what worlds of joy and sorrow, what maddening griefs and ecstacies have these poor monosyllables conveyed! More than any other words in the whole dictionary have they enraptured or saddened the human heart; rung out the peal of joy, or sounded the knell of hope. And yet not so often as at first sight might appear, for these blunt and honest words are, both, kindly coy in scenes of agony. "There are occasions--and those the most terrible in life--when the lips are fairly absolved from using them, and when, if the eye cannot express what the muffled tongue refuses to tell, the tongue seeks any stammering compassionate circumlocution rather than utter the dreaded syllable. 'Is there no hope?' says the mother, hanging over her dying child, to the physician, in whose looks are life and death. He dare not say 'yes;' but to such a question silence and dejection can alone say 'no.'" XXXI. _A GROUP OF TALKERS._ I. THE MISANTHROPE.