God Honors Our Faith

Sir William Napier was one day taking a long walk, when he met a little girl about five years old, sobbing over a broken bowl. She had dropped and broken it in bringing it back from the field to which she had taken her father’s dinner in it, and she said she would be beaten on her return for having broken it; then, with a sudden gleam of hope, she innocently looked into his face and said: “But you can mend it, can’t you?” 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 by promising to meet his little friend in the same spot at 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 someone whom he especially wished to see. He hesitated for some little time, trying to calculate the possibility of honoring the meeting to his little friend of the 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 members as he did so, “I cannot disappoint her, she trusted me so implicitly.”