By this time the boys were all in school.  “There is not one prig in the whole lot,” said the headmaster sadly.  “I wish there was, but only those boys come here who are notoriously too good to become current coin in the world unless they are hardened with an alloy of vice.  I should have liked to show you our gambling, book-making, and speculation class, but the assistant-master who attends to this branch of our curriculum is gone to Sunch’ston this afternoon.  He has friends who have asked him to see the dedication of the new temple, and he will not be back till Monday.  I really do not know what I can do better for you than examine the boys in Counsels of Imperfection.”

So saying, he went into the schoolroom, over the fireplace of which my father’s eye caught an inscription, “Resist good, and it will fly from you.  Sunchild’s Sayings, xvii. 2.”  Then, taking down a copy of the work just named from a shelf above his desk, he ran his eye over a few of its pages.

He called up a class of about twenty boys.

“Now, my boys,” he said, “Why is it so necessary to avoid extremes of truthfulness?”

“It is not necessary, sir,” said one youngster, “and the man who says that it is so is a scoundrel.”

“Come here, my boy, and hold out your hand.”  When he had done so, Mr. Turvey gave him two sharp cuts with a cane.  “There now, go down to the bottom of the class and try not to be so extremely truthful in future.”  Then, turning to my father, he said, “I hate caning them, but it is the only way to teach them.  I really do believe that boy will know better than to say what he thinks another time.”

He repeated his question to the class, and the head-boy answered, “Because, sir, extremes meet, and extreme truth will be mixed with extreme falsehood.”

“Quite right, my boy.  Truth is like religion; it has only two enemies—­the too much and the too little.  Your answer is more satisfactory than some of your recent conduct had led me to expect.”

“But, sir, you punished me only three weeks ago for telling you a lie.”

“Oh yes; why, so I did; I had forgotten.  But then you overdid it.  Still it was a step in the right direction.”

“And now, my boy,” he said to a very frank and ingenuous youth about half way up the class, “and how is truth best reached?”

“Through the falling out of thieves, sir.”

“Quite so.  Then it will be necessary that the more earnest, careful, patient, self-sacrificing, enquirers after truth should have a good deal of the thief about them, though they are very honest people at the same time.  Now what does the man” (who on enquiry my father found to be none other than Mr. Turvey himself) “say about honesty?”

“He says, sir, that honesty does not consist in never stealing, but in knowing how and where it will be safe to do so.”

“Remember,” said Mr. Turvey to my father, “how necessary it is that we should have a plentiful supply of thieves, if honest men are ever to come by their own.”