THIS IS A STORY, and perhaps a lesson in life, I heard from an Amish man. Technically I guess he was a Mennonite, or whatever you'd call someone who drives a truck for a living who once rode to worship in a horse-drawn buggy.

When he was a boy, he and his friends did something bad, a prank that had bothered him his whole life, or at least from the moment he had stopped laughing. As pranks go, this one was gentle. Nobody got hurt, except the pranksters. In fact, they were hurt only by their guilty consciences. I may get some of the words wrong, but let me tell it as I remember it.

When he was growing up in Berks County there were weekly services held in individual homes of the small Amish community. Families gathered in a neighbor's house to pray, and after a while the children were allowed outside to play while their parents stayed inside. Bored teenagers are the same, with or without electricity, and so this Amish boy and his buddies decided to pull a practical joke on the recently arrived, and to their minds, obnoxious new minister by filling his carriage with rocks from a pile of stones recently cleared from an adjoining farm field.

There must have been a ton of them.

The giggling boys waited behind some trees until the meeting ended to see how the minister would react. Instead of being upset or seeking an explanation, the young minister simply unloaded the rocks one by one and returned them to the pile. The boys watched for half an hour until he hitched his horse and rode off. The minister never spoke of it. Turns out, he was a pretty good guy.

Years later the boys, now grown men, were filled with regret and felt the need to apologize to the young minister, now middle aged. As a group they went to his house and confessed their trechery and asked his forgiveness. He forgave them, of course, but he seemed baffled by their heartfelt sorrow over something that happened 20 years earlier. He remembered the incident, but he had never dwelled on it.

Finally, he felt sorry for them. "You mean you've been carrying those rocks around all these years?" he said. "I put them down that same night."