Mothers sometimes say at once, in such a case, "I don't pity you at all.

I have no doubt you deserved it." This only increases the tumult of commotion in the boy's mind, without at all tending to help him to feel a sense of his guilt.

His mind, still imperfectly developed, can not take cognizance simultaneously of all the parts and all the aspects of a complicated transaction.

The sense of his wrong-doing, which forms in his teacher's and in his mother's mind so essential a part of the transaction, is not present in his conceptions at all.

There is no room for it, so totally engrossed are all his faculties with the stinging recollections of suffering, the tumultuous emotions of anger and resentment, and now with the additional thought that even his mother has taken part against him.