hearse not unto another that which is told unto thee, and thou
shall fare never the worse." If it be true of a wife, that "a silent and
loving woman is a gift of the Lord," I am sure it is no less so of a
friend; in friendship, as in most relations of life, silence, in its
season, is a cardinal virtue.

Girls are often tempted to retail their family affairs to some chosen
friend, from a love of confidential mysteries; the pleasure of being a
martyr leads not only to the communication of moving details of home life,
but frequently to their invention. A friend of mine adopted a niece, who
afterwards married and wrote from India asking her aunt to look through
and burn her old letters. My friend found touching pictures of home
tyranny in the letters from school friends and answers to similar
complaints, which the niece had evidently written about her own treatment
and since forgotten; possibly the home circles of the other girls would
have found the same difficulty that my friend did in recognizing
themselves:

"Portrayed with sooty garb and features swarth."

Equal with Honour, and before Tact, among the conditions of Friendship, I
would place Truth, for there can be no union without this for a basis. We
have touched already on the truth involved in what is called being
"faithful" to a friend, but there are many other kinds required. Passing
over the more obvious of these, I would draw attention to the subtler form
of untruth, involved in endowing your friend with imaginary gifts and
graces.

Yet the more we know of a true friend, the more we find to reverence in
him, and the more ground for humility in ourselves: "Have a quick eye to
see" their virtues; nay, more, idealize those virtues as much as you will,
for this is a very different thing from endowing them with those they have
not; this is only learning to see with that divine insight essential to
the highest truth in friendship. "There is a perfect ideal," says Ruskin,
"to be wrought out of every human face around us," and so it is with our
friends' characters.

And when we have found that ideal and true self, we must be loyal to
it--loyal to our friends against their lower selves as well as against
their detractors. Plutarch says, "The influence of a true friend is felt
in the help that he gives the noble part of nature; nothing that is weak
or poor meets with encouragement from him. While the flatterer fans every
spark of suspicion, envy, or grudge, he ma