t John, who was curious in the matter of books, sat quietly down in
a corner to examine it; and on the middle page, under the head "Family
Record," he found, in a large, bold hand, the date of the birth of
"Lillie Ellis" in figures of the most uncompromising plainness; and
thence, with one flash of his well-trained arithmetical sense, came
the perception that, instead of being twenty years old, she was in
fact twenty-seven,--and that of course she had lied to him.

[Illustration: "He found the date of the birth of 'Lillie Ellis.'"]

It was a horrid and a hard word for an American young man to have
suggested in relation to his wife. If we may believe the French
romancer, a Frenchman would simply have smiled in amusement on
detecting this petty feminine _ruse_ of his beloved. But American men
are in the habit of expecting the truth from respectable women as a
matter of course; and the want of it in the smallest degree strikes
them as shocking. Only an Englishman or an American can understand the
dreadful pain of that discovery to John.

The Anglo-Saxon race have, so to speak, a worship of truth; and
they hate and abhor lying with an energy which leaves no power of
tolerance.

The Celtic races have a certain sympathy with deception. They have a
certain appreciation of the value of lying as a fine art, which has
never been more skilfully shown than in the passage from De Balzac we
have quoted. The woman who is described by him as lying so sweetly and
skilfully is represented as one of those women "qui ont je ne
sais quoi de saint et de sacre, qui inspirent tant de respect que
l'amour,"--"a woman who has an indescribable something of holiness and
purity which inspires respect as well as love." It was no detraction
from the character of Jesus, according to the estimate of Renan, to
represent him as consenting to a benevolent fraud, and seeming to work
miracles when he did not work them, by way of increasing his good
influence over the multitude.

But John was the offspring of a generation of men for hundreds of
years, who would any of them have gone to the stake rather than have
told the smallest untruth; and for him who had been watched and
guarded and catechised against this sin from his cradle, till he was
as true and pure as a crystal rock, to have his faith shattered in the
woman he loved, was a terrible thing.

As he read the fatal figures, a mist swam before his eyes,--a sort of
faintness came over him. It seeme