“My Uncle Jonathan never forgave me, fully believing that I had done it on purpose to get rid of the trouble of carrying his portmanteau. Years rolled away, and I was not so much as permitted to enter the door of my Uncle Jonathan.
“Time, however, heals many a sore, and while it ruffles many a smooth brow, smooths many a ruffled temper. My Uncle Jonathan so far relented, that when about to make his will, he sent to me to call upon him exactly at ten o’clock. Determined to be in time, I set off, allowing myself some minutes to spare and pulling out my watch at the door, found that for once in my life I had kept my appointment to the second. The servant, to my surprise, told me, that my Uncle Jonathan had ordered the door to be shut in my face for being behind my time. It was then I found out my watch was too slow, and that I was exactly “Five minutes too late.”
“Had I been earlier on that occasion I might have been provided for, but now I am a poor man, and a poor man I am likely to remain. However, good may arise from my giving this short account of my foolish habit, as it may possibly convince some of the value of punctuality, and dispose them to avoid the manifold evils of being “Five minutes too late.””
Few young persons are sensible of the importance of punctuality, because they are not aware of the value of time. But time is money; and to rob a man of his time, by obliging him to wait beyond the appointed hour to meet your engagement with him, is equivalent to robbing him of so much money as he could have earned in the lost time. The habit of punctuality must be acquired early. Be punctual in the family and school, and you will be a punctual man.
Section VIII.—Contention.
danger of contention.
QUARRELLING generally arises from selfishness and anger. Selfishness is grasping. It respects not the rights of others. It will yield none of its own. The selfish person is therefore continually coming in conflict with others; and, as impediments are thrown in the way of his gratification, his passions are roused. Anger is a species of insanity. When one yields to his passions, he loses self-control. He takes an enemy into his bosom, and suffers himself to be nosed about by him at will. No one can tell what dreadful thing he may do when once he gives a loose rein to his passions.
“The beginning of strife is as the letting out of waters.” When you open a little drain to a pond of water, it runs slowly at first, in a very small stream; but the body of water above rushes into the channel and wears it deeper, and that increases the pressure and widens it still more, till presently the whole body comes pouring forth in an irresistible torrent. One dry season, in the summer, a man in Vermont, who owned a mill, on a small stream near a large pond, found his water failing, so that his mill was likely to stop. To prevent this, he collected together a few of the neighbors, and dug a little trench from the pond to the stream that carried his mill. At first it ran very slowly and quietly along, till it began to wear away the channel, and to turn the force of the body of water in the pond in that direction, when it increased violently, tore away the banks, and poured the whole contents of the pond into the little stream, carried off the mill, and rushed on with impetuous fury through the valley, sweeping away fences, bridges, barns, houses, and every thing that came in its way.
At a place called Brag Corner, in the State of Maine, a small stream falls into the Sandy river, on which a superior grist-mill was erected a few years since. The stream not affording water enough, a pond containing fifty or one hundred acres, having no outlet, and lying two hundred feet above the level where the mill stood, was connected with the stream that carried the mill by an artificial canal. The water of the pond began to gully away the gravel over which it was made to run, and having formed a regular channel, defied all human control, and, in the space of six hours, cut a ravine seventy feet deep, and let out the whole pond, sweeping away the mill, foundation and all, and carrying away a house and blacksmith’s shop, which stood near, not giving the owner time to save any thing of consequence from his house.
Such, Solomon says, is strife. When you begin to quarrel, you know not where it will end. It not unfrequently terminates in the death of one of the parties, as in the following case: A boy about eleven years of age, son of Mr. Philip Petty, of Westport, R. I., took his father’s gun, as he said, to go a gunning. His elder brother attempted to take it from him. A quarrel ensued, between the two brothers, and in the course of the scuffle, the gun went off and lodged the contents in the younger one’s bowels. He lingered a few hours in great agony and died. How must the other one feel, to think that the quarrel, which he began, led to the death of his brother. How much safer to take Solomon’s advice, and “leave off contention before it be meddled with.”