There was once a boy, named Will, who did something very bad. He told a lie about a schoolmate with whom he was angry, and the teacher punished his schoolmate, deceived by the lie that Will told.
At recess Will noticed that the scholars shrank away from him as if they were disgusted and frightened, but he thought little of it. During the afternoon he saw his teacher looking at him several times very intently and strangely. When he got home his mother cast one glance upon him, and then burst into tears.
Will rushed up into his little room to look at himself in the mirror and see what was the matter. Dear me! he saw a terrible sight. He had become, in some way, so transparent that his heart shone right through his body and his thick clothes, and his heart was a dreadful black one! His coat and vest were black, but they looked quite light, compared with the blackness of that heart, piercing through.
Well, Will was ashamed to go out. He hung his head among his schoolmates. He tried to get into dark corners where people would not see his black heart; but he could find no corner dark enough to hide his blackness. At last he went crying to his mother, and asked her what he should do. He told her the whole story of his lie, and of how the black heart had come at once.
Will’s mother led him to the mirror when he had finished the sad story. “See,” said she; “already your heart is less black, now that you have confessed to some one. I think that it will all be as it was before if you pray to Jesus to forgive you, and tell your classmate and your teacher and the whole school how sorry you are.”
And so Will thought he would. He prayed that night long and earnestly, and was astonished and delighted to see, in the morning, how much lighter his heart was. Its blackness now seemed so little noticeable that he thought he had done enough, and that it would become as it was before without his taking any more trouble; so he went all that day without saying anything about it.
But he found that his mates shrank from him more than ever, and his teacher looked at him more strangely than ever, and when he got home he saw that his heart was of a more intense blackness than ever before. So that night he prayed hard, and the next morning he prayed hard, and went off to school without looking in the mirror. As soon as school began he rose up before them all and told what a dreadful thing he had done, and asked the forgiveness of his classmate, and the teacher, and the whole school. They all forgave him gladly, and at recess everybody was kind to him, and, best of all, when he got home and looked in the mirror he found that there was no great, black heart showing through, but he was a happy boy again, just as he had been before he told the terrible lie.