Among others was the query: "How many grains of the medicine does your father take every day ?" Miss B., supposing she referred to the quinine, answered: "Five, generally; but on the day of which mamma speaks, ten grains were prescribed." And from this scanty amount of rapidly acquired information had grown the story to which I had been an amazed listener.
"Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth!" Yet this girl did not intend to lie.

She gleaned scraps of a conversation, and allowed a vivid imagination to supply the portions she did not hear.

Add to this the love of producing a sensation, which is an inherent trait of many characters, and behold potent reasons for seven-tenths of the cases of exaggeration which come to our notice, romances constructed upon the "impressionist-picture" plan--a thing of splash and glare and abnormal perspective that vitiates the taste for symmetry and right coloring.
We all like to be the first to tell a story, and are anxious to relate it so well that our listeners shall be entertained.

That a tale loses nothing in the telling is an established fact, especially if the narrator thereof observes a lack of interest on the part of his listeners.

Then the temptation to arouse them to attention becomes almost irresistible and unconsciously one accepts the maxim at which we all sneer,--that it is folly to let the truth spoil a good story.
Every day we have occasion to hold our heads, reeling to aching with conflicting accounts of some one incident, and repeat the question asked almost nineteen hundred years ago: "What is truth ?" We hear much of people who are "too frank." These destroyers of the peace of mind of friend and foe alike pride themselves on the fact that they are "nothing if not candid," and "always say just what they think." Be it understood, this is not truthfulness.