r and to wait."

CHAPTER XLI

THE MIGHT OF LITTLE THINGS

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

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

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

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

Men are led by trifles.--NAPOLEON.

"A pebble on the streamlet scant
Has turned the course of many a river."

"The bad thing about a little sin is that it won't stay little."

"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."

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.

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 would have 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 bobtailed 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, and asked him how he
could give such a minute description of the man 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 s