Her solicitude for the child’s moral welfare is as commendable as it is necessary and her desire to prevent such incidents from becoming a habit is praiseworthy. Her methods, only, are wrong. Instead of punishment the child is entitled to instruction which will develop his mentality until he can distinguish between fact and fancy. With growth in mental stature comes coördination of ideas and a clearer discernment of the line of demarcation between the real and the unreal, and when the child becomes mentally able to distinguish between the two, such misstatements of fact will be at an end. Falsehood in young children has been characterized by Dr. Hall as “a new mental combination independent of experience.” In rare cases this mental fog continues, with diminishing intensity, through maturity. Everyone knows of the man who told a story so often that he himself finally believed it. It chiefly manifests itself in adults in exaggeration of the qualities, abilities, or prowess of the teller. Witness the fisherman of your acquaintance whose account of the weight and size of his biggest fish grows with each succeeding recital. He does not mean to lie. He thinks he is telling the truth. In the beginning he justified his exaggeration of weight and size by doubting the accuracy of the scale and rule by which he weighed and measured the fish. The continued repetition of his yarn produced an impression on his brain closely resembling actuality. He deceived himself. Pride in his piscatorial prowess made deception easy. His error was partly mental, partly moral, the latter being in direct ratio to the clarity of his mental processes. It is a tremendous tribute to the mental stability and moral discernment of a fisherman to be able to refrain, in after years, from overstating the weight of his biggest fish. We now consider another phase of misstatement of fact--the falsehood of the older boy. At the age of six or seven the mental fog begins to clear. He sees things in a truer, brighter light. The relationship of facts to each other becomes more and more cognizable. His moral faculties are emerging from a chaos of mental impressions. This age, approximately, marks the birth of moral consciousness. His conception of right and wrong takes form and begins its process of development. At this period he begins to distinguish between fact and fancy and as his mental processes become clarified by increasing maturity, so in a corresponding degree his confusion of the unreal with the real disappears. Mentality begins to dominate imagination.