The Boy Scouts Book of Stories by Morgan Robertson

Author:Morgan Robertson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Start Classics
Published: 2014-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

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Dick did not study much French on that morning in late October. For suddenly a new, insidious question jumped into the forefront of his thoughts: Why had he blurted out everything to Mr. Beaver? Why hadn't he just lied?

That question thrust at the very roots of life, and Dick Harrington knew it. He went cold and hot by turns. Somehow it had never occurred to him to lie. He did not know why. It was possibly because his father was such a shining figure of truthfulness personified. He remembered something he had overheard his mother say to his father a long time ago—"I never realized until I married you that it is really awful to lie."

Was it really so awful? A lie in time certainly simplified life a lot. And as long as it did not hurt anybody else—what was really the difference? A goody-goody Sunday-school teacher had told him, when he was five, that the lightning would smite him if he told a lie. Whereupon he had told a lie deliberately during the course of the next thunderstorm to test Mr. Goody-Goody's veracity, and proved him a liar, first thing.

Staring at French irregular verbs, Dick clenched his hands, trying to figure it all out. Suddenly, forgetting where he was, he pounded the desk-top with his left fist. Then he gave a yowl which rang through the schoolroom, providing exhilarating diversion to two hundred lifted heads. For in his cogitations his right hand had clutched the edge of the desk on which the top closed.

He explained the accident to Mr. Watrous, who proved skeptical, though the Spy was forced to admit that the hand looked red enough to hurt.

The schoolroom settled again into quiet. The excitement, from start to finish, had covered about ninety seconds. No one suspected that the unshaven, disheveled boy was, in that studious, quiet place, having his first great wrestle with life.

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