SACREDNESS OF A PROMISE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 240, 7 December 1877, Page 17

SACREDNESS OF A PROMISE.

As eminent British statesman is said to have traced his own sense of the sacredness of a promise to a curious lesson he got from his father when he was a boy. When home for the holidays, and walking with his father in the garden, his father pointed to a wall which he intended to have pulled down. " Oh," said the boy, " I should so like to see a wall pulled down." " Well, my boy, you shall," said his father. The thing, however, escaped his memory, and during the boy's absence a number of improvements were being made, and among them this wall was torn down and a new one built up in its place. When the boy came home and saw it, he said — " Oh, father, you promised to let me see that wall pulled down." Instantly the* father remembered his promise, and was deeply pained to think that he had seemed careless about his plighted word. "My boy,"' he said, "you are right. I did promise, and I ought not to have forgotten. It is too late now to do just what I said I would, but you wanted to see a wall pulled down, and so you shall." And he actually ordered the masons up, and made them pull down and rebuild the new wall, that as nearly as possible his promise might be made good. " It cost me twenty pounds," he said to a friend who was bantering him about it, " but," he said, "if it had cost a hundred, I should have thought it a cheap way of impressing on my boy's mind as long as he lives the importance that a man of honour should attach to his plighted word," — Exchange,