‘SOMEBODY PAYS.’

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 39, 26 September 1891, Page 427

‘SOMEBODY PAYS.’

A druggist in one of our large cities said lately, ‘lf I am prompt and careful in my business, I owe it to a lesson which I learned when I was an errand boy in the house of which I am now master. I was sent one day to deliver a vial of medicine just at noon, but being hungry, stopped to eat my luncheon. • The patient, for lack of the medicine, sank rapidly, and for some days was thought to be dying. ’ ‘ I felt myself his murderer. The agony of that long suspense made a man of me. I learned then that for every one of our acts of carelessness or misdoing, how’ever petty, some one pays in suflering. The law is the more terrible to me because it is not always the misdoer himself who suffers.’ This law is usually ignored by young people. The act of carelessness or selfishness is so trifling, what harm can it do? No harm, apparently, to the actor, who goes happily on his way ; but somebody pays. A young girl, to make conversation, thoughtlessly repeats a bit of gossip which she forgets the next moment; but long afterward the woman whom she has maligned finds her good name tainted by the poisonous whisper. A lad, accustomed to take wine, persuades a chance comrade to drink with him, partly out of a good-humoured wish to be hospitable, partly, it may be, out of contempt for ‘ fanatical reformers.’ He goes on his way, and never knows that his chance guest, having inherited the disease of alcoholism, continues to drink, ana becomes a hopeless victim. Our grandfathers expressed this truth in a way of their own. ‘ For the lack of a nail the shoe was lost. For the lack of the shoe the rider was lost, For the lack of the rider the message was lost. For the lack of the message the battle was lost.' Our blindness to the consequences of our shortcomings is a merciful provision of God. Who could look composedly upon the rank outgrowth of all his vice and folly from childhood to middle age ? But though we do not see it, we do well to remember that it is there; and to remind ourselves at the beginning of every day, that each careless act, each unkind word in it, will be paid for, not by us, perhaps, but in the want or pain of some one.