They have gone from attainment to attainment, and from
class to class, until they have become regularly graduated liars.
The air of the city is filled with falsehoods. They hang pendent from
the chandeliers of our finest residences; they crowd the shelves of
some of our merchant princes; they fill the side-walk from curb-stone
to brown-stone facing. They cluster around the mechanic's hammer,
and blossom from the end of the merchant's yard-stick, and sit in
the doors of churches. Some call them "fiction." Some style them
"fabrication." You might say that they were subterfuge,
disguise, delusion, romance, evasion, pretence, fable, deception,
misrepresentation; but, as I am ignorant of anything to be gained by
the hiding of a God-defying outrage under a lexicographer's blanket, I
shall chiefly call them what my father taught me to call them--_lies_.
I shall divide them into agricultural, mercantile, mechanical, and
ecclesiastical lies; leaving those that are professional, social, and
political for some other chapter.
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