You always intend
to do things but they are not done. You--" The girl interrupted:
"Twenty-one promises to you, broken!" she exclaimed. "Twenty-one! I
shall keep every one of them. Let me see them." Then she burst into
tears and the old excuse fell almost unconsciously from her lips, "I
meant to, I really meant to."
Sympathetically, but without being spared, the girl was shown that the
promises could not be kept now; the time had passed and the things had
been done by others. The inconvenience and unhappiness caused by many of
these unkept promises were explained to her and the teacher asked that
for one week she should make her no promises and that she should not
volunteer to do anything for her.
"Oh, but I want to do things for you. I must!" she cried with all the
passion of her emotional nature.
"What I want most," the teacher responded, "is that you _do_ things, but
say nothing."
The girl tried faithfully. Her love and admiration for the teacher
furnished a strong motive, and the week showed a real gain. One day her
mother called at the school. She said that her daughter had made a
strange request of her. "She asked me," said the mother, "to compel her
to do everything she promised to do, or said she was going to do and to
punish her if she failed. I asked her to explain her strange request and
learned of the struggle she has been making.
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