BE NOT READY TO THINK EVIL

Marlborough Express, Volume XLII, Issue 140, 15 June 1908, Page 2

BE NOT READY TO THINK EVIL

/ * (By, Ella Wheeler Wilcox.) Pluman nature possesses many undesirable traits, many . faults and blemishes, which need eradicating; and among them is one which seems to be a commingling of vanity, suspicion and love of the marvellous. A iVw years ago a young man went oat1 fishing in a rowboat. A storm arose; the boat drifted in without an oarsman. Weeks passed, and then came the story, repeated from mouth to mouth, that the young man had been seen at various places, and had even spoken with two acquaintances. He left a young wife, and the story was whispered first, and then took bolder form, that the fisherman had selected this1 method of retreat from an unhappy marital alliance. . Scarcely had the story gained the footing of a plausible tale, when the battered and disfigured body of the man was found near the spot where he had been fishing when the storm broke. Then the scandalmongers hushed their voices, and no one was found ready to father the tale of desertion. A few we,eks ago another young man in the same seashore town went fOrth on a night of storm to rescue a,boat that was in peril of being demolished on the rocks. He never came back.'' . After a week's search for the body the sorrowing mother heard the whispered tale that he had -,b6en seen by someone in a distant town; that he had boarded a train, and seemed anxious to avoid detection. l ■ As a supplement came the report that the young man was in debt, and his disappearance was evidently planned that he might escape his creditors. .. And again, the. bloated and bruised body drifted to shore, and gave its , silejfi- and ghastly refutation to the cruel lie. Something over a year ago a prominent business man, trying to find relief from financial losses in stimulants, fled to the river finally and believed he would end his woes by discarding his body. His hat and coat were found on the shore. Again came the tale of absolute identification. Someone had conversed with him; he had spoken of his losses; he had,said he was going away, and so on, a complete fabric of falsehoods, so proven later by the discovery of the long-dead body. Who can explain this quality in the human mind which loves to cast reproach upon the unfortunate absentee?, It must arise first in suspicion; imagination gives body to suspicion; vanity, which takes form in a love of relating marvellous tales, gives speech to the unkind fabrication; and once spoken, th monster" lie goes forth like a gigantic bat, 'to feed upon the credulity of other gossiploving minds. It is always evidence of a higher and finer type of being if one is the last, rather than the first, to believe an unkind tale.. It is better a thousand times to be deceived by a conniving rascal than to suspect an innocent person of deception. ~ Yet over and over we hear wise individuals boasting that they were the "very first" to suspect some culprit of- wi*ong-doing, and the man who is forever declaring that it is " impossible to fool him " is the type of man who will shape the ball or set it rolling when some poor victim of accident disappears from public view without leavjng an address.'., "Alas for the rarity of Christian charity!" , :