Show the old settler my aly dear san Jua ners bishop nielson was sixty years old when lie he came in 1880 to preside over the remote little new 1 town of bluff ile he was about 1 thirty years old when lie he came wr from 0 m D denmark cn n ar k t to 0 c cross r 0 ss th the e plains with i ta i th the e h handcart hand a d c cart a rt c company 0 m pa ny where lie he froze his feet and was a cripple I 1 all the rest of his life bishop nielson hated arrears he found no comfort in postponing a task which needed to be done his obligations great or small w were ere never dumped into the bottomless intentions of sometime but they got attention at once ile he could not sleep on oil delayed duty but his wonted rest depended on his consciousness of having an each call in the time thereof ile he answered his letters on the day lie he received them he paid fr for what he bought when lie he got it in his hands in the years since he passed on in 1906 it has occurred to me ile he must have been a kinsman of the great scandinavian king oscar who kept always before him a motto reading something like this 1 I pass this way but once therefore whatever I 1 can do or ought to do in the cause of right at this place let me do it now let me make no delay 1 I cherish tender memories of old bishop nielson limping back and forth over the deep sand to give generous attention to every duty as it came to rest upon him and then I 1 contemplate the great multitude atu de of splendid men and women today who in spite of their vir virtues have that wretched habit ha biLof joi telling jelling themselves and their trusting friends that they will do it sometime as of some other time any other time would be more easy or better than right now sometime is inveterately overdue and too often the delay is not for time only but for all eternity I 1 know good men of whom I 1 would hate to speak as anything but honest whose promise is not to be relied upon at all because they have a strange aversion to doing things now and this sad lack of system carries on into their memories and too often the thing they promised in good faith to do they never do at all and there is a class of men who lean always with slovenly irresolution on the heresy that the best way to dispose of an obligation is is to delay it indefinitely they dump all their worries and all their debts and promises into this spacious sometime bin leaving them to pile up there in a formidable heap too much and too tangled even to contemplate the only way to transact business with them is to have it finished on the spot or their fair promises will go in bin and be lost beyond recovery A right good friend of mine confessed to me that he wes getting so troubled that he sleep for worry about the unanswered letters he had been receiving and shoving into one of his desk drawers for a year its pitiful its a disease maybe im extreme when I 1 compare it with the f whisky habit they are both demoralizing moral izing I 1 find this disease so prevalent among men and women boys and girls that my first concern in f finding out about them so I 1 can estimate their worth and know how much they are to be trusted I 1 want first to ascertain whether they are alive and abreast of their firing line and free to act with prompt response or whether they are const to death with an old accumulation of duties debts promises and sacred obligations not fulfilled and never to be fulfilled albert R lyman i |