ation. 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 were 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.

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

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

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 a