It is very discouraging to find, when you are straining every nerve to tell the truth, that people do not believe you, and fancy that you are exaggerating. It makes you feel inclined to go and exaggerate on purpose, just to show them the difference. I know I often feel tempted to do so myself: it is my early training that saves me.
We should always be very careful never to give way to exaggeration; it is a habit that grows upon one.
And it is such a vulgar habit, too. In the old times, when poets and dry-goods salesmen were the only people who exaggerated, there was something clever and distingué about a reputation for "a tendency to over, rather than to under-estimate the mere bald facts." But everybody exaggerates nowadays. The art of exaggeration is no longer regarded as an "extra" in the modern bill of education; it is an essential requirement, held to be most needful for the battle of life.
The whole world exaggerates. It exaggerates everything, from the yearly number of bicycles sold, to the yearly number of heathens converted—into the hope of Salvation and more whisky. Exaggeration is the basis of our trade, the fallow-field of our art and literature, the groundwork of our social life, the foundation of our political existence. As schoolboys, we exaggerate our fights and our marks and our fathers' debts. As men, we exaggerate our wares, we exaggerate our feelings, we exaggerate our incomes—except to the tax-collector, and to him we exaggerate our "outgoings,"—we exaggerate our virtues; we even exaggerate our vices, and, being in reality the mildest of men, pretend we are dare-devil scamps.
We have sunk so low now that we try to act our exaggerations, and to live up to our lies. We call it "keeping
