A PRISONER'S PERSEVERANCE.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 459, 2 April 1890, Page 3

A PRISONER'S PERSEVERANCE.

‘ Perseverance will accomplisli everything.’ I had these words for a writing lesson once and I shall never forget them. It is a great thing to have perseverance, says the author of * Trying to Find Europe.’ There was once a man who was shut up in a dungeon with walls 200 feet thick, made of the hardest kind of stone. He had no tools except a pair of scissors his brother had sent him in a loaf of bread, but he remembered that a drop of water will wear away a stone if it falls on the stone long enough, and that a coral worm, which is so small that you can hardly see it, will eat up and destroy a coral reef if you will only give it time enough. So he said he would persevere and dig a hole through the wall of the dungeon with the scissors and escape if it took him a hundred years. He had been digging about a year, when the Governor pardoned him and the gaoler brought him the joyful news. But they couldn’t get him to leave the dungeon. He told the gaoler that ho had undertaken to dig his way through the wall and escape in that way, and that he was going to stick to it no matter how long it might take. The gaoler urged him to give it up and walk out of the door, and even offered him $lO to give up his dungeon to a new lodger, but nothing could induce him to change his mind. So he stayed in the dungeon and dug away at the wall for forty-seven years, and every six months he had to pay a big bill for damages to the gaol, and he finally died when he was half through the wall. This shows what a splendid thing perseverance is and that we all ought to perse vere.