ts the hero had been baulked of fortune by
his habit of fibbing. They took counsel together, and pledged themselves
not to tell the smallest lie, upon any occasion whatever. It was a
frightful slavery, for there are a great many times in a boy's life when
it seems as if the truth really could not serve him. Their great trial
was having to take a younger brother with them whenever they wanted to
go off with other boys; and it had been their habit to get away from him
by many little deceits which they could not practise now: to tell him
that their mother wanted him; or to send him home upon some errand to
his pretended advantage that had really no object but his absence. I
suppose there is now no boy living who would do this. My boy and his
brother groaned under their good resolution, I do not know how long; but
the day came when they could bear it no longer, though I cannot give
just the time or the terms of their backsliding. That elder brother had
been hard enough on my boy before the period of this awful reform: his
uprightness, his unselfishness, his truthfulness were a daily reproach
to him, and it did not need this season of absolute sincerity to
complete his wretchedness. Yet it was an experience which afterwards he
would not willingly have missed: for once in his little confused life he
had tried to practise a virtue because the opposite vice had been made
to appear foolish and mischievous to him; and not from any superstitious
fear or hope.

As far as I can make out, he had far more fears than hopes; and perhaps
every boy has. It was in the Smith house that he began to be afraid of
ghosts, though he never saw one, or anything like one. He never saw
even the good genius who came down the chimney and filled the children's
stockings at Christmas. He wished to see him; but he understood that St.
Nicholas was a shy spirit, and was apt to pass by the stockings of boys
who lay in wait for him. His mother had told him how the Peltsnickel
used to come with a bundle of rods for the bad children when the
Chriskingle brought the presents of the good ones, among his
grandmother's Pennsylvania German kindred; and he had got them all
somehow mixed up together. Then St. Nicholas, though he was so pleasant
and friendly in the poem about the night before Christmas, was known to
some of the neighbor boys as Santa Claus; they called it Centre Claws,
and my boy imagined him with large talons radiating from the pit of his
stomach. Bu