p. 127 | Small Engagement

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 4, 1871

Small Engagement.

How much the brightness of Christian honor is dimmed by inattention to “trifles,” has by contrast an illustration in the following bit of history:

Sir William Napier was one day taking a long walk near Freshford, when he met a little girl about five years old sobbing over a broken bowl. She had fallen while bringing it from the field to which she had taken her father’s dinner in it, and she said she would be beaten for having broken it; then with a sudden gleam of hope, she innocently looked into his face, and said, “But ye can mend it, can’t ye?” Sir William explained that he could not mend the bowl, but the trouble he could mend by the gift of a sixpence to buy another.

However, on opening his purse, it was empty of silver, and he had to make amends to meet his little friend the same hour next day, and to bring the sixpence with him, bidding her, meanwhile, tell her mother she had seen a gentleman who would bring her the money for the bowl next day. The child, entirely trusting him, went on her way comforted.

On his return home, he found an invitation awaiting him to dine in Bath the following evening, to meet some one whom he especially wished to see. He hesitated for some little time, trying to calculate the possibility of giving the meeting to his little friend of broken bowl, and of still being in time for the dinner party in Bath; but, finding that this could not be, he wrote to decline accepting the invitation, on the plea of a “pre-engagement,” saying to one of his family as he did so, “I cannot disappoint her, she trusted me so implicitly.”