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Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe

Creator:  (editor)
Date: 1909
Publisher: Dana Estes & Company, Boston
Source: Available at selected libraries
Figures From This Artifact: Figure 1

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"She seems to be one of those who have the law graven upon their hearts; who do not see the right intellectually, but perceive it intuitively; who do good not so much from principle as from instinct; and who, if made to swerve a moment from the right by any temptation, soon recover themselves by their native elasticity. For the preservation of the purity of her soul, in her dark and silent pilgrimage through time, God has implanted within her that native love of modesty, thoughtfulness, and conscientiousness, which precept may strengthen but could never have bestowed; and, as at midnight and in the storm the faithful needle points unerring to the Pole, and guides the mariner over the trackless ocean, so will this principle guide her to happiness and to Heaven. May no tempter shake her native faith in this, her guide; may no disturbing force cause it to swerve from its true direction!

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"As yet, it has not done so, and I can recollect no instance of moral obliquity except under strong temptation. I recall now one instance of deliberate deception, and that, I am bound to confess with sorrow, was perhaps attributable to indiscretion on my part. She came to me one day dressed for a walk, and had on a new pair of gloves which were stout and rather coarse. I began to banter and tease her, (in that spirit of fun of which she is very fond, and which she usually returns with interest,) upon the clumsy appearance of her hands, at which she first laughed, but soon began to look so serious and even grieved that I tried to direct her attention to something else, and soon forgot the subject. But not so poor Laura; her personal vanity, or her love of approbation, had been wounded; she thought the gloves were the cause of it and resolved to be rid of them. Accordingly they disappeared and were supposed to be lost; but her guileless nature betrayed itself, for without being questioned she frequently talked about the gloves, not saying directly that they were lost, but asking if they might not be in such or such a place. She was uneasy under the new garb of deceit, and soon excited suspicion. When it reached my ears I was exceedingly pained, and moreover doubtful what course to pursue. At last, taking her in the most affectionate way, I began to tell her a story of a little girl who was much beloved by her parents and brothers and sisters, and for whose happiness everything was done; and asked her whether the little girl should not love them in return, and try to make them happy; to which she eagerly assented. 'But,' said I, 'she did not, she was careless, and caused them much pain.' At this Laura was excited, and said the girl was in the wrong, and asked what she did to displease her relations; I replied,' she deceived them; they never told her anything but the truth, but one day she acted so as to make them think she had not done a thing, when she had done it.' Laura then eagerly asked if the girl told a fib, and I explained to her how one might tell a falsehood without saying a word; which she readily understood, becoming all the time more interested, and evidently touched. I then tried to explain to her the different degrees of culpability resulting from carelessness, from disobedience, and from intentional deceit. She soon grew pale, and evidently began to apply the remarks to her own case, but still was very eager to know about the 'wrong little girl,' and how her parents treated her. I told her her parents were grieved and cried, at which she could hardly restrain her own tears. After a while she confessed to me that she had deceived about the gloves, that they were not lost, but hidden away. I then tried to show her that I cared nothing about the gloves, that the loss of a hundred pairs would be nothing if unaccompanied by any deceit. She perceived that I was grieved, and going to leave her to her own thoughts, and clung to me as if in terror of being alone. I was forced however to inflict pain upon her.

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"Her teachers and the persons most immediately about her were requested to manifest no other feeling than that of sorrow on her account; and the poor creature going about from one to another for comfort and for joy, but finding only sadness, soon became agonized with grief. When left alone she sat pale and motionless, with a countenance the very image of sorrow; and so severe seemed the discipline, that I feared lest the memory of it should be terrible enough to tempt her to have recourse to the common artifice of concealing one prevarication by another, and thus insensibly get her into the habit of falsehood. I therefore comforted her by assurances of the continued affection of her friends, tried to make her understand that their grief and her suffering were the simple and necessary consequences of her careless or wilful misstatement, and made her reflect upon the nature of the emotion she experienced after having uttered the untruth; how unpleasant it was, how it made her feel afraid, and how widely different it was from the fearless and placid emotion which followed truth.

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