How often do we hear as an excuse for some harm done or committed, “I did not mean to do it. I had no thought of causing any such trouble.” Certainly “want of thought” draws after it a great train of evils, and leaves behind it a broad trail of cost and sorrow. We see the results of carelessness in all departments of life, and in all degrees, from the most trivial, causing only inconvenience and confusion, to the most far reaching, casting a shadow into eternity.
A nurse fell down the stairs with an infant in her arms, and fifty years afterward there was a humpbacked man creeping along the streets. A child threw a piece of lemon peel on the sidewalk, and there was an accident an hour after, in which an old lady was severely injured; so severely that she will never be able to walk again. A switch-tender opened the wrong switch, and the heavy train dashed into a great building that stood at the end of the short side-track, and lives were lost amid the wreck. An operator gave a careless touch to his instrument, and there was a terrible collision on the rail. A boy shot an arrow from his bow; it went whizzing away from the string, and a comrade is blind for the rest of his life. A woman poured oil from a can into her stove to hasten her fire, and there was an explosion, and an outburst of flame, which burned down the building about her. A young man pointed a gun, in sport, at his best friend, playfully saying that he would shoot him, and one noble youth was carried to his grave, and another goes through life with an awful shadow of memory hanging over him, which quenches all his joy and makes all life dark for him. A druggist’s clerk compounded the prescription in haste, and in an hour a sick girl was dying in terrible pain and convulsions, from the poison in the prescription.
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