TEN MINUTES' DELAY

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 30, 1881

TEN MINUTES' DELAY.

ALL well-informed people are familiar with the sad account of the death of the young Prince Napoleon, who fell pierced by nineteen wounds by the Zulus, in South Africa, June 1, 1879.

Many will remember that Capt. Carey, in his published report, mentioned that after they had selected the camping ground—the object for which the squad of six had been detailed—and had had coffee, and rested, he suggested that they should remount and return to camp. But the young prince, who commanded the squad, said:—

"No, let's wait ten minutes."

Just as they were preparing to remount, at the expiration of that ten minutes, a body of Zulus came on them, and all fled but the prince, whose horse broke from him. After a desperate resistance, he fell, covered with wounds, and died, "in the tall grass of the douga."

I presume all do not know that this pleading for ten minutes' delay was a habit of the young prince from early childhood.

A correspondent of a leading Paris Journal interviewed the empress as she was upon the eve of departure for the scene of the tragedy that had wrecked all their earthly hopes, and drew her into conversation on the subject of her son. She talked freely during the interview, but with an evident anguish of spirit, which seemed only more sad from her effort at control. During this interview, while speaking of the childhood of her son, the prince, she unconsciously revealed the trait in his character that has caused all this woe—to her, wrecked hopes and a broken heart; to him, the probable loss of a throne, an earthly future, and his life.

After describing her as still lovely in her lonely grief, the writer from whom we quote, said: "The empress had now risen and stood, slightly trembling with emotion, when, stepping rapidly and gracefully across the room, she opened a cabinet, from which she took a pocket book, and read therefrom on a leaf, "Going with Carey"—the last words ever written by the prince; then she added:—

"Of all that Capt. Carey has ever written in regard to my son, those fatal ten minutes alone I hold to be true. It was ever his habit," she continued, "to plead for ten minutes' delay; so much so that I used to tell him they ought to call him Monsieur Dix Minutes. It was always ten minutes more to sleep in the morning; ten minutes more at night to sleep in his chair; and when too much overcome with sleep to speak he would hold up his two little hands, the ten fingers representing the ten minutes more for which he pleaded."

The habit of procrastination is a deadly foe to all prosperity in temporal or moral affairs.