rmy of the
approach of the Danes.

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!

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

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 the value of the ruby 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.

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." Perhaps you
turned a cold shoulder but once, and made but one stinging remark, yet
it may have cost you a friend forever.

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 missing marriage certificate kept the hod-carrier