the kind old dame, "that if the money had not been found, you would
have been convicted out of your own mouth of having been the
thief?" "Oh yes," says the boy cheerfully; "but I couldn't help it-
-it came into my head."

Of course this is an exceptional case; but it illustrates a curious
thing about boys--I mentioned it the other day--which is, their
extraordinary willingness and even anxiety to be thought worse than
they are. Even boys of unexceptionable principle will talk as if
they were not only not particular, but positively vicious. They
don't like aspersions on their moral character to be made by
others, but they rejoice to blacken themselves; and not even the
most virtuous boys can bear to be accused of virtue, or thought to
be what is called "Pi." This does not happen when boys are by
themselves; they will then talk unaffectedly about their principles
and practice, if their interlocutor is also unaffected. But when
they are together, a kind of disease of self-accusation attacks
them. I suppose that it is the perversion of a wholesome instinct,
the desire not to be thought better than they are; but part of the
exaggerated stories that one hears about the low moral tone of
public schools arises from the fact that innocent boys coming to a
public school infer, and not unreasonably, from the talk of their
companions that they are by no means averse to evil, even when, as
is often the case, they are wholly untainted by it.

The same thing seems to me to prevail very widely nowadays. The
old-fashioned canting hypocrisy, like that of the old servant in
the Master of Ballantrae, who, suffering under the effects of
drink, bears himself like a Christian martyr, has gone out; just as
the kind of pride is extinct against which the early Victorian