“What present, my boy?” the mother asks.
“Noah’s ark, mother.”
“Did I promise to buy you Noah’s ark? Are you not mistaken?”
“You said may be you would do it; and I expected you would.”
“But may be, my dear, is not a promise.”
With these words the little boy set on crying at his great disappointment, and could not be comforted.
Now this way of talking to children is calculated to give them wrong views of truthfulness, and to cherish within them a similar way of equivocation. It creates hopes and blights them. It gives ground for expectation, and then destroys it. “Let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay; for whatsoever is more than this cometh of evil.” “The promises of God are all Yea.”
V. The Absent-Minded.—It is far from being pleasant to meet in conversation a talker of this class. To ask a question of importance or to give a reply to one whose mind is wandering in an opposite direction is anything but complimentary and assuring. How mortifying to be speaking to a person who you think is sweetly taking in all you say, and when finished you find you have been talking to one whose mind was as absent from what you said as a man living in America or New Zealand! He wakes up, perhaps, to consciousness, some time after you have done speaking, with the provoking interrogatory, “I beg pardon, sir; but pray what were you speaking about just now?”
He has been known at the dinner-table to ask a blessing at least three times.
He has been seen in company to make one of his best bows in reply to what he supposed was a compliment paid him, when it was intended for some other person.