Little strokes fell great oaks.-FRANKLIN.

  Think naught a trifle, though it small appear;
  Small sands the mountain, moments make the year,
  And trifles, life. 
        YOUNG.

  “Scorn not the slightest word or deed,
    Nor deem it void of power;
  There’s fruit in each wind-wafted seed,
    That waits its natal hour.”

It is but the littleness of man that seeth no greatness in trifles.-WENDELL PHILLIPS.

He that despiseth small things shall fall by little and little.-ECCLESIASTICUS.

Often from our weakness our strongest principles of conduct are born; and from the acorn, which a breeze has wafted, springs the oak which defies the storm.-BULWER.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.-EMERSON.

Men are led by trifles.-NAPOLEON I.

  “A pebble on the streamlet scant
    Has turned the course of many a river;
  A dewdrop on the baby plant
    Has warped the giant oak forever.”

The mother of mischief is no bigger than a midge’s wing.-SCOTCH
PROVERB.

“The bad thing about a little sin is that it won’t stay little.”

  “A little bit of patience often makes the sunshine come,
  And a little bit of love makes a very happy home;
  A little bit of hope makes a rainy day look gay,
  And a little bit of charity makes glad a weary way.”

“Arletta’s pretty feet, glistening in the brook, made her the mother of William the Conqueror,” says Palgrave’s “History of Normandy and England.”  “Had she not thus fascinated Duke Robert the Liberal, of Normandy, Harold would not have fallen at Hastings, no Anglo-Norman dynasty could have arisen, no British Empire.”

Small things become great when a great soul sees them.  Trifles light as air sometimes suggest to the thinking mind ideas which revolutionize the world.

We may tell which way the wind blew before the Deluge by marking the ripple and cupping of the rain in the petrified sand now preserved forever.  We tell the very path by which gigantic creatures, whom man never saw, walked to the river’s edge to find their food.

The tears of Veturia and Volumnia saved Rome from the Volscians when nothing else could move the vengeful heart of Coriolanus.

It was little Greece that rolled back the overflowing tide of Asiatic luxury and despotism, giving instead to Europe and America models of the highest political freedom yet attained, and germs of limitless mental growth.  A different result at Plataea had delayed the progress of the human race more than ten centuries.

Among the lofty Alps, it is said, the guides sometimes demand absolute silence, lest the vibration of the voice bring down an avalanche.

The power of observation in the American Indian would put many an educated man to shame.  Returning home, an Indian discovered that his venison, which had been hanging up to dry, had been stolen.  After careful observation he started to track the thief through the woods.  Meeting a man on the route, he asked him if he had seen a little, old, white man, with a short gun, and with a small bob-tailed dog.  The man told him he had met such a man, but was surprised to find that the Indian had not even seen the one he described.  He asked the Indian how he could give such a minute description of the man whom he had never seen.  “I knew the thief was a little man,” said the Indian, “because he rolled up a stone to stand on in order to reach the venison; I knew he was an old man by his short steps; I knew he was a white man by his turning out his toes in walking, which an Indian never does; I knew he had a short gun by the mark it left on the tree where he had stood it up; I knew the dog was small by his tracks and short steps, and that he had a bob-tail by the mark it left in the dust where he sat.”

Two drops of rain, falling side by side, were separated a few inches by a gentle breeze.  Striking on opposite sides of the roof of a court-house in Wisconsin, one rolled southward through the Rock River and the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico; while the other entered successively the Fox River, Green Bay, Lake Michigan, the Straits of Mackinaw, Lake Huron, St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, Detroit River, Lake Erie, Niagara River, Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and finally reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  How slight the influence of the breeze, yet such was the formation of the continent that a trifling cause was multiplied almost beyond the power of figures to express its momentous effect upon the destinies of these companion raindrops.  Who can calculate the future of the smallest trifle when a mud crack swells to an Amazon, and the stealing of a penny may end on the scaffold?  Who does not know that the act of a moment may cause a life’s regret?  A trigger may be pulled in an instant, but the soul returns never.

A spark falling upon some combustibles led to the invention of gunpowder.  Irritable tempers have marred the reputation of many a great man, as in the case of Edmund Burke and of Thomas Carlyle.  A few bits of seaweed and driftwood, floating on the waves, enabled Columbus to stay a mutiny of his sailors which threatened to prevent the discovery of a new world.  There are moments in history which balance years of ordinary life.  Dana could interest a class for hours on a grain of sand; and from a single bone, such as no one had ever seen before, Agassiz could deduce the entire structure and habits of an animal so accurately that subsequent discoveries of complete skeletons have not changed one of his conclusions.

A cricket once saved a military expedition from destruction.  The commanding officer and hundreds of his men were going to South America on a great ship, and, through the carelessness of the watch, they would have been dashed upon a ledge of rock had it not been for a cricket which a soldier had brought on board.  When the little insect scented the land, it broke its long silence by a shrill note, and this warned them of their danger.

“Strange that a little thing like that should cause a man so much pain!” exclaimed a giant, as he rolled in his hand and examined with eager curiosity the acorn which his friend the dwarf had obligingly taken from the huge eye into which it had fallen just as the colossus was on the point of shooting a bird perched in the branches of an oak.

Sometimes a conversation, or a sentence in a letter, or a paragraph in an article, will help us to reproduce the whole character of the author; as a single bone, a fish scale, a fin, or a tooth, will enable the scientist and anatomist to reproduce the fish or the animal, although extinct for ages.

By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.  A little boy in Holland saw water trickling from a small hole near the bottom of a dike.  He realized that the leak would rapidly become larger if the water was not checked, so he held his hand over the hole for hours on a dark and dismal night until he could attract the attention of passers-by.  His name is still held in grateful remembrance in Holland.

The beetling chalk cliffs of England were built by rhizopods, too small to be clearly seen without the aid of a magnifying-glass.

What was so unlikely as that throwing an empty wine-flask in the fire should furnish the first notion of a locomotive, or that the sickness of an Italian chemist’s wife and her absurd craving for reptiles for food should begin the electric telegraph?

Madame Galvani noticed the contraction of the muscles of a skinned frog which was accidentally touched at the moment her husband took a spark from an electrical machine.  She gave the hint which led to the discovery of galvanic electricity, now so useful in the arts and in transmitting vocal or written language.

M. Louis Pasteur was usher in the Lyceum.  Thursdays he took the boys to walk.  A student took his microscope to examine insects, and allowed Pasteur to look through it.  This was the starting of the boy on the microscopic career which has made men wonder.  He was almost wild with enthusiasm at the new world which the microscope revealed.

A stamp act to raise 60,000 pounds produced the American Revolution, a war that cost 100,000,000 pounds.  What mighty contests rise from trivial things!

Congress met near a livery stable to discuss the Declaration of Independence.  The members, in knee breeches and silk stockings, were so annoyed by flies, which they could not keep away with their handkerchiefs, that it has been said they cut short the debate, and hastened to affix their signatures to the greatest document in history.

“The fate of a nation,” says Gladstone, “has often depended upon the good or bad digestion of a fine dinner.”

A young man once went to India to seek his fortune, but, finding no opening, he went to his room, loaded his pistol, put the muzzle to his head, and pulled the trigger.  But it did not go off.  He went to the window to point it in another direction and try it again, resolved that if the weapon went off he would regard it as a Providence that he was spared.  He pulled the trigger and it went off the first time.  Trembling with excitement he resolved to hold his life sacred, to make the most of it, and never again to cheapen it.  This young man became General Robert Clive, who, with but a handful of European soldiers, secured to the East India Company and afterwards to Great Britain a great and rich country with two hundred millions of people.

The cackling of a goose aroused the sentinels and saved Rome from the Gauls, and the pain from a thistle warned a Scottish army of the approach of the Danes.  “Had Acre fallen,” said Napoleon, “I should have changed the face of the world.”

Henry Ward Beecher came within one vote of being elected superintendent of a railway.  If he had had that vote America would probably have lost its greatest preacher.  What a little thing fixes destiny!

In the earliest days of cotton spinning, the small fibres would stick to the bobbins, and make it necessary to stop and clear the machinery.  Although this loss of time reduced the earnings of the operatives, the father of Robert Peel noticed that one of his spinners always drew full pay, as his machine never stopped.  “How is this, Dick?” asked Mr. Peel one day; “the on-looker tells me your bobbins are always clean.”  “Ay, that they be,” replied Dick Ferguson.  “How do you manage it, Dick?” “Why, you see, Meester Peel,” said the workman, “it is sort o’ secret!  If I tow’d ye, yo’d be as wise as I am.”  “That’s so,” said Mr. Peel, smiling; “but I’d give you something to know.  Could you make all the looms work as smoothly as yours?” “Ivery one of ’em, meester,” replied Dick.  “Well, what shall I give you for your secret?” asked Mr. Peel, and Dick replied, “Gi’ me a quart of ale every day as I’m in the mills, and I’ll tell thee all about it.”  “Agreed,” said Mr. Peel, and Dick whispered very cautiously in his ear, “Chalk your bobbins!” That was the whole secret, and Mr. Peel soon shot ahead of all his competitors, for he made machines that would chalk their own bobbins.  Dick was handsomely rewarded with money instead of beer.  His little idea has saved the world millions of dollars.

Trifles light as air often suggest to the thinking mind ideas which have revolutionized the world.

A poor English boy was compelled by his employer to deposit something on board a ship about to start for Algiers, in accordance with the merchant’s custom of interesting employees by making them put something at risk in his business and so share in the gain or loss of each common venture.  The boy had only a cat, which he had bought for a penny to catch mice in the garret where he slept.  In tears, he carried her on board the vessel.  On arriving at Algiers, the captain learned that the Dey was greatly annoyed by rats, and loaned him the cat.  The rats disappeared so rapidly that the Dey wished to buy the cat, but the captain would not sell until a very high price was offered.  With the purchase-money was sent a present of valuable pearls for the owner of Tabby.  When the ship returned the sailors were greatly astonished to find that the boy owned most of the cargo, for it was part of the bargain that he was to bring back the value of his cat in goods.  The London merchant took the boy into partnership; the latter became very wealthy, and in the course of business loaned money to the Dey who had bought the cat.  As Lord Mayor of London, our cat merchant was knighted, and became the second man in the city,-Sir Richard Whittington.

When John Williams, the martyr missionary of Erromanga, went to the South Sea Islands, he took with him a single banana-tree from an English nobleman’s conservatory; and now, from that single banana-tree, bananas are to be found throughout whole groups of islands.  Before the negro slaves in the West Indies were emancipated a regiment of British soldiers was stationed near one of the plantations.  A soldier offered to teach a slave to read on condition that he would teach a second, and that second a third, and so on.  This the slave faithfully carried out, though severely flogged by the master of the plantation.  Being sent to another plantation, he repeated the same thing there, and when at length liberty was proclaimed throughout the island, and the Bible Society offered a New Testament to every negro who could read, the number taught through this slave’s instrumentality was found to be no less than six hundred.

A famous ruby was offered to the English government.  The report of the crown jeweler was that it was the finest he had ever seen or heard of, but that one of the “facets” was slightly fractured.  That invisible fracture reduced its value thousands of dollars, and it was rejected from the regalia of England.

It was a little thing for the janitor to leave a lamp swinging in the cathedral at Pisa, but in that steady swaying motion the boy Galileo saw the pendulum, and conceived the idea of thus measuring time.

“I was singing to the mouthpiece of a telephone,” said Edison, “when the vibrations of my voice caused a fine steel point to pierce one of my fingers held just behind it.  That set me to thinking.  If I could record the motions of the point and send it over the same surface afterward, I saw no reason why the thing would not talk.  I determined to make a machine that would work accurately, and gave my assistants the necessary instructions, telling them what I had discovered.  That’s the whole story.  The phonograph is the result of the pricking of a finger.”

It was a little thing for a cow to kick over a lantern left in a shanty, but it laid Chicago in ashes, and rendered homeless a hundred thousand people.

You turned a cold shoulder but once, you made but one stinging remark, yet it lost you a friend forever.

Some little weakness, some self-indulgence, a quick temper, want of decision, are little things, you say, when placed beside great abilities, but they have wrecked many a career.  The Parliament of Great Britain, the Congress of the United States, and representative governments all over the world have come from King John signing the Magna Charta.

Bentham says, “The turn of a sentence has decided many a friendship, and, for aught we know, the fate of many a kingdom.”

The sight of a stranded cuttlefish led Cuvier to an investigation which made him one of the greatest natural historians in the world.  The web of a spider suggested to Captain Brown the idea of a suspension bridge.  A man, looking for a lost horse, picked up a stone in the Idaho mountains which led to the discovery of a rich gold mine.

An officer apologized to General O. M. Mitchel, the astronomer, for a brief delay, saying he was only a few moments late.  “I have been in the habit of calculating the value of the thousandth part of a second,” was Mitchel’s reply.

A missing marriage certificate kept the hod-carrier of Hugh Miller from establishing his claim to the Earldom of Crawford.  The masons would call out, “John, Yearl of Crawford, bring us anither hod o’ lime.”

Not long ago the great steamship Umbria was stopped in mid-Atlantic by a flaw in her engine shaft.

The absence of a comma in a bill which passed through Congress several years ago cost our government a million dollars.  A single misspelled word prevented a deserving young man from obtaining a situation as instructor in a New England college.  A cinder on the eyeball will conquer a Napoleon.  Some little weakness, as lack of courtesy, want of decision, a bad temper, may nullify the labor of years.

“I cannot see that you have made any progress since my last visit,” said a gentleman to Michael Angelo.  “But,” said the sculptor, “I have retouched this part, polished that, softened that feature, brought out that muscle, given some expression to this lip, more energy to that limb, etc.”  “But they are trifles!” exclaimed the visitor.  “It may be so,” replied the great artist, “but trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.”

That infinite patience which made Michael Angelo spend a week in bringing out a muscle in a statue with more vital fidelity to truth, or Gerhard Dow a day in giving the right effect to a dewdrop on a cabbage leaf, makes all the difference between success and failure.

By scattering it upon a sloping field of grain so as to form, in letters of great size, “Effects of Gypsum,” Franklin brought this fertilizer into general use in America.  By means of a kite he established principles in the science of electricity of such broad significance that they underlie nearly all the modern applications of that science, with probably boundless possibilities of development in the future.

More than four hundred and fifty years have passed since Laurens Coster amused his children by cutting their names in the bark of trees, in the land of windmills, and the monks have laid aside forever their old trade of copying books.  From that day monarchies have crumbled, and Liberty, lifting up her head for the first time among the nations of the earth, has ever since kept pace with the march of her sister, Knowledge, up through the centuries.  Yet how simple was the thought which has borne such a rich harvest of benefit to mankind.

As he carved the names of his prattling children it occurred to him that if the letters were made in separate blocks, and wet with ink, they would make clear printed impressions better and more rapidly than would the pen.  So he made blocks, tied them together with strings, and printed a pamphlet with the aid of a hired man, John Gutenberg.  People bought the pamphlets at a slight reduction from the price charged by the monks, supposing that the work was done in the old way.  Coster died soon afterward, but young Gutenberg kept the secret, and experimented with metals until he had invented the metal type.  In an obscure chamber in Strasburg he printed his first book.

At about this time a traveler called upon Charles VII. of France, who was so afraid somebody would poison him that he dared eat but little, and made his servants taste of every dish of food before he ate any.  He looked with suspicion upon the stranger; but when the latter offered a beautiful copy of the Bible for only seven hundred and fifty crowns, the monarch bought it at once.  Charles showed his Bible to the archbishop, telling him that it was the finest copy in the world, without a blot or mistake, and that it must have taken the copyist a lifetime to write it.  “Why!” exclaimed the archbishop in surprise, “I bought one exactly like it a few days ago.”  It was soon learned that other rich people in Paris had bought similar copies.  The king traced the book to John Faust, of Strasburg, who had furnished Gutenberg money to experiment with.  The people said that Faust must have sold himself to the devil, and he only escaped burning at the stake by divulging the secret.

William Caxton, a London merchant who went to Holland to purchase cloth, bought a few books and some type, and established a printing-office in Westminster Chapel, where he issued, in 1474, “The Game of Chess,” the first book printed in England.

The cry of the infant Moses attracted the attention of Pharaoh’s daughter, and gave the Jews a lawgiver.  A bird alighting on the bough of a tree at the mouth of the cave where Mahomet lay hid turned aside his pursuers, and gave a prophet to many nations.  A flight of birds probably prevented Columbus from discovering this continent, for when he was growing anxious, Martin Alonzo Pinzon persuaded him to follow a flight of parrots toward the southwest; for to the Spanish seamen of that day it was good luck to follow in the wake of a flock of birds when on a voyage of discovery.  But for his change of course Columbus would have reached the coast of Florida.  “Never,” wrote Humboldt, “had the flight of birds more important consequences.”

The children of a spectacle-maker placed two or more pairs of the spectacles before each other in play, and told their father that distant objects looked larger.  From this hint came the telescope.

“Of what use is it?” people asked with a sneer, when Franklin told of his discovery that lightning and electricity are identical.  “What is the use of a child?” replied Franklin; “it may become a man.”

“He who waits to do a great deal of good at once,” said Dr. Johnson, “will never do any.”  Do good with what thou hast, or it will do thee no good.

Every day is a little life; and our whole life but a day repeated.  Those that dare lose a day are dangerously prodigal, those that dare misspend it, desperate.  What is the happiness of your life made up of?  Little courtesies, little kindnesses, pleasant words, genial smiles, a friendly letter, good wishes, and good deeds.  One in a million-once in a lifetime-may do a heroic action.  The atomic theory is the true one.  Many think common fractions vulgar, but they are the components of millions.

He is a great man who sees great things where others see little things, who sees the extraordinary in the ordinary.  Ruskin sees a poem in the rose or the lily, while the hod-carrier would perhaps not go a rod out of his way to see a sunset which Ruskin would feed upon for a year.

Napoleon was a master of trifles.  To details which his inferior officers thought too microscopic for their notice he gave the most exhaustive attention.  Nothing was too small for his attention.  He must know all about the provisions, the horse fodder, the biscuits, the camp kettles, the shoes.  When the bugle sounded for the march to battle, every officer had his orders as to the exact route which he should follow, the exact day he was to arrive at a certain station, and the exact hour he was to leave, and they were all to reach the point of destination at a precise moment.  It is said that nothing could be more perfectly planned than his memorable march which led to the victory of Austerlitz, and which sealed the fate of Europe for many years.  He would often charge his absent officers to send him perfectly accurate returns, even to the smallest detail.  “When they are sent to me, I give up every occupation in order to read them in detail, and to observe the difference between one monthly return and another.  No young girl enjoys her novel as much as I do these returns.”  The captain who conveyed Napoleon to Elba was astonished with his familiarity with all the minute details connected with the ship.  Napoleon left nothing to chance, nothing to contingency, so far as he could possibly avoid it.  Everything was planned to a nicety before he attempted to execute it.

Wellington too was “great in little things.”  He knew no such things as trifles.  While other generals trusted to subordinates, he gave his personal attention to the minutest detail.  The history of many a failure could be written in three words, “Lack of detail.”  How many a lawyer has failed from the lack of details in deeds and important papers, the lack of little words which seemed like surplusage, and which involved his clients in litigation, and often great losses!  How many wills are contested from the carelessness of lawyers in the omission or shading of words, or ambiguous use of language!

Physicians often fail to make a reputation through their habitual blundering, carelessness in writing prescriptions, failure to give minute instruction.  The world is full of blunderers; business men fail from a disregard of trifles; they go to the bank to pay a note the day after it has gone to protest; they do not pay their bills promptly; do not answer their letters promptly or file them away accurately; their books do not quite balance; they do not know exactly how they stand, they have a contempt for details.

“My rule of conduct has been that whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well,” said Nicolas Poussin, the great French painter.  When asked the reason why he had become so eminent in a land of famous artists he replied, “Because I have neglected nothing.”

Not even Helen of Troy, it is said, was beautiful enough to spare the tip of her nose; and if Cleopatra’s had been an inch shorter Mark Antony would never have become infatuated with her wonderful charms, and the blemish would have changed the history of the world.  Anne Boleyn’s fascinating smile split the great Church of Rome in twain, and gave a nation an altered destiny.  Napoleon, who feared not to attack the proudest monarchs in their capitols, shrank from the political influence of one independent woman in private life, Madame de Stael.  Had not Scott sprained his foot his life would probably have taken a different direction.

Cromwell was about to sail for America when a law was passed prohibiting emigration.  At that time he was a profligate, having squandered all his property.  But when he found that he could not leave England he reformed his life.  Had he not been detained who can tell what the history of Great Britain would have been?

When one of his friends asked Scopas the Thessalian for something that could be of little use to him, he answered, “It is in these useless and superfluous things that I am rich and happy.”

It was the little foxes that spoiled the vines in Solomon’s day.  Mites play mischief now with our meal and cheese, moths with our woolens and furs, and mice in our pantries.  More than half our diseases are produced by infinitesimal creatures called microbes.

Most people call fretting a minor fault, a foible, and not a vice.  There is no vice except drunkenness which can so utterly destroy the peace, the happiness, of a home.

“We call the large majority of human lives obscure,” says Bulwer, “presumptuous that we are!  How know we what lives a single thought retained from the dust of nameless graves may have lighted to renown?”

The theft of a diamond necklace from a French queen convulsed Europe.  From the careful and persistent accumulation of innumerable facts, each trivial in itself, but in the aggregate forming a mass of evidence, a Darwin extracts his law of evolution, and Linnaeus constructs the science of botany.  A pan of water and two thermometers were the tools by which Dr. Black discovered latent heat, and a prism, a lens, and a sheet of pasteboard enabled Newton to unfold the composition of light and the origin of colors.  An eminent foreign savant called on Dr. Wollaston, and asked to be shown over those laboratories of his in which science had been enriched by so many great discoveries, when the doctor took him into a little study, and, pointing to an old tea tray on the table, on which stood a few watch glasses, test papers, a small balance, and a blow-pipe, said, “There is my laboratory.”  A burnt stick and a barn door served Wilkie in lieu of pencil and paper.  A single potato, carried to England by Sir Walter Raleigh in the sixteenth century, has multiplied into food for millions, driving famine from Ireland again and again.

It seemed a small thing to drive William Brewster, John Robinson, and the poor people of Austerfield and Scrooby into perpetual exile, but as Pilgrims they became the founders of a mighty people.  A cloud may hide the sun which it cannot extinguish.

“Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth.”  “A look of vexation or a word coldly spoken, or a little help thoughtlessly withheld, may produce long issues of regret.”

It was but a little dispute, a little flash of temper, the trigger was pulled in an instant, but the soul returned never.

A few immortal sentences from Garrison and Phillips, a few poems from Lowell and Whittier, and the leaven is at work which will not cease its action until the whipping-post and bodily servitude are abolished forever.

  “For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
  For want of a shoe the horse was lost;
  For want of a horse the rider was lost, and all,”

says Poor Richard, “for want of a horse-shoe nail.”

A single remark dropped by an unknown person in the street led to the successful story of “The Bread-winners.”  A hymn chanted by the barefooted friars in the temple of Jupiter at Rome led to the famous “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

“Do little things now,” says a Persian proverb; “so shall big things come to thee by and by asking to be done.”  God will take care of the great things if we do not neglect the little ones.

“Words are things,” says Byron, “and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions think.”

“I give these books for the founding of a college in this colony;” such were the words of ten ministers who in the year 1700 assembled at the village of Branford a few miles east of New Haven.  Each of the worthy fathers deposited a few books upon the table around which they were sitting; such was the founding of Yale College.

“He that has a spirit of detail,” says Webster, “will do better in life than many who figured beyond him in the university.”

The pyramid of knowledge is made up of little grains of information, little observations picked up from everywhere.

For a thousand years Asia monopolized the secret of silk culture, and at Rome the product was sold for its weight in gold.  During the sixth century, at the request of Justinian, two Persian monks brought a few eggs from China to Europe in a hollow cane.  The eggs were hatched by means of heat, and Asia no longer held the monopoly of the silk business.

In comparison with Ferdinand, preparing to lead forth his magnificent army in Europe’s supreme contest with the Moors, how insignificant seemed the visionary expedition of Columbus, about to start in three small shallops across the unknown ocean.  But grand as was the triumph of Ferdinand, it now seems hardly worthy of mention in comparison with the wonderful achievement of the poor Genoese navigator.

Only one hundred and ninety-two Athenians perished in the battle of Marathon, but Europe was saved from a host which is said to have drunk rivers dry, and to have shaken the solid earth as they marched.

Great men are noted for their attention to trifles.  Goethe once asked a monarch to excuse him, during an interview, while he went to an adjoining room to jot down a stray thought.  Hogarth would make sketches of rare faces and characteristics upon his finger-nails upon the streets.  Indeed, to a truly great mind there are no little things.  “The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see objects through small crannies or holes, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances,” said Bacon.  Trifles light as air suggest to the keen observer the solution of mighty problems.  Bits of glass arranged to amuse children led to the discovery of the kaleidoscope.  Goodyear discovered how to vulcanize rubber by forgetting, until it became red hot, a skillet containing a compound which he had before considered worthless.  Confined in the house by typhoid fever, Helmholtz, with a little money which he had saved by great economy, bought a microscope which led him into the field of science where he became so famous.  A ship-worm boring a piece of wood suggested to Sir Isambard Brunei the idea of a tunnel under the Thames at London.  Tracks of extinct animals in the old red sandstone led Hugh Miller on and on until he became the greatest geologist of his time.  Sir Walter Scott once saw a shepherd boy plodding sturdily along, and asked him to ride.  This boy was George Kemp, who became so enthusiastic in his study of sculpture that he walked fifty miles and back to see a beautiful statue.  He did not forget the kindness of Sir Walter, and, when the latter died, threw his soul into the design of the magnificent monument erected in Edinburgh to the memory of the author of “Waverley.”

A poor boy applied for a situation at a bank in Paris, but was refused.  As he left the door, he picked up a pin.  The bank president saw this, called the boy back, and gave him a situation from which he rose until he became the greatest banker of Paris,-Laffitte.

It was the turning point in Theodore Parker’s life when he picked up a stone to throw at a turtle.  Something within him said, “Don’t do it,” and he didn’t.  He went home and asked his mother what it was in him that said “Don’t;” and she taught him the purpose of that inward monitor which he ever after chose as his guide.  It is said that David Hume became a deist by being appointed in a debating society to take the side of infidelity.  Voltaire could not erase from his mind the impression of a poem on infidelity committed at the age of five.  The “Arabian Nights” aroused the genius of Coleridge.  A Massachusetts soldier in the Civil War observed a bird hulling rice, and shot it; taking its bill for a model, he invented a hulling machine which has revolutionized the rice business.  A war between France and England, costing more than a hundred thousand lives, grew out of a quarrel as to which of two vessels should first be served with water.  The quarrel of two Indian boys over a grasshopper led to the “Grasshopper War.”  George IV. of England fell in a fit, and a village apothecary bled him, restoring him to consciousness.  The king made him his physician, a position of great honor and profit.

Many a noble ship has stranded because of one defective timber, when all other parts were strong.  Guard the weak point.

No object the eye ever beheld, no sound however slight caught by the ear, or anything once passing the turnstile of any of the senses, is ever let go.  The eye is a perpetual camera imprinting upon the sensitive mental plates, and packing away in the brain for future use every face, every tree, every plant, flower, hill, stream, mountain, every scene upon the street, in fact, everything which comes within its range.  There is a phonograph in our natures which catches, however thoughtless and transient, every syllable we utter, and registers forever the slightest enunciation, and renders it immortal.  These notes may appear a thousand years hence, reproduced in our descendants, in all their beautiful or terrible detail.

All the ages that have been are rounded up into the small space we call “To-day.”  Every life spans all that precedes it.  To-day is a book which contains everything that has transpired in the world up to the present moment.  The millions of the past whose ashes have mingled with the dust for centuries still live in their destinies through the laws of heredity.

Nothing has ever been lost.  All the infinitesimals of the past are amassed into the present.

The first acorn had wrapped up in it all the oak forests on the globe.

“Least of all seeds, greatest of all harvests,” seems to be one of the great laws of nature.  All life comes from microscopic beginnings.  In nature there is nothing small.  The microscope reveals as great a world below as the telescope above.  All of nature’s laws govern the smallest atoms, and a single drop of water is a miniature ocean.

The strength of a chain lies in its weakest link, however large and strong all the others may be.  We are all inclined to be proud of our strong points, while we are sensitive and neglectful of our weaknesses.  Yet it is our greatest weakness which measures our real strength.  A soldier who escapes the bullets of a thousand battles may die from the scratch of a pin, and many a ship has survived the shocks of icebergs and the storms of ocean only to founder in a smooth sea from holes made by tiny insects.  Drop by drop is instilled into the mind the poison which blasts many a precious life.

How often do we hear people say, “Oh, it’s only ten minutes, or twenty minutes, till dinner time; there’s no use doing anything,” or use other expressions of a like effect?  Why, it is just in these little spare bits of time, these odd moments, which most people throw away, that men who have risen have gained their education, written their books, and made themselves immortal.

Small things become great when a great soul sees them.  The noble or heroic act of one man has sometimes elevated a nation.  Many an honorable career has resulted from a kind word spoken in season or the warm grasp of a friendly hand.

  It is the little rift within the lute,
  That by and by will make the music mute,
  And, ever widening, slowly silence all. 
        TENNYSON.

  “It was only a glad ‘good-morning,’
  As she passed along the way,
  But it spread the morning’s glory
  Over the livelong day.”

  “Only a thought in passing-a smile, or encouraging word,
  Has lifted many a burden no other gift could have stirred. 
          Only!-But then the onlys
          Make up the mighty all.”