painting, the girl promised that the book should be brought, the picture
would gladly be loaned by her father, the poppies or tulips she would
get from her garden. Almost never was the promise fulfilled, still she
continued to promise. One afternoon her teacher talked with her after
school and showed her a list of twenty-one things she had promised to do
and had not done. "I know you do not mean to be untruthful, but you
are," the teacher told her. "Whenever you promise now to do a thing, the
other girls smile. You wanted to be chairman of the luncheon committee
the other day and did not receive a single vote, not because the girls
dislike you, but because they cannot depend upon you. 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."