been able to discover
what forgiveness means. "_Is it still the same between us?_" Why, how
can it be? It is eternally different; and yet you are still the friend
of my heart. "Do you understand me?" God knows; I should think it
highly improbable.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a
room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room
a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have
perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly
shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at
the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his
tongue? And, again, a lie may be told by a truth, or a truth conveyed
through a lie. Truth to facts is not always truth to sentiment; and
part of the truth, as often happens in answer to a question, may be the
foulest calumny. A fact may be an exception; but the feeling is the
law, and it is that which you must neither garble nor belie. The whole
tenor of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate
statement; the beginning and the end define and travesty the
intermediate conversation. You never speak to God; you address a
fellow-man, full of his own tempers; and to tell truth, rightly
understood, is not to state the true facts, but to convey a true
impression; truth in spirit, not truth to letter, is the true veracity.
To reconcile averted friends a Jesuitical discretion is often needful,
not so much to gain a kind hearing as to communicate sober truth.
Women have an ill name in this connection; yet they live in as true
relations; the lie of a good woman is the true index of her heart.

"It takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest and most useful passage I
remember to have read in any modern author[1] "two to speak truth--one
to speak and another to hear." He must be very little experienced, or
have no great zeal for truth, who does not recognise the fact. A grain
of anger or a grain of suspicion produces strange acoustical effects,
and makes the ear greedy to remark offence. Hence we find those who
have once quarrelled carry themselves distantly, and are ever ready to
break the truce. To speak truth there must be moral equality or else
no respect; and hence between parent and child intercourse is apt to
degenerate into a verbal fencing bout, and misapprehensions to become
ingrained. And there is another side to this, for the parent begins